让我们停止谈论YOE

If you’ve looked for a job recently, this should look familiar to you:

如果您最近在找工作，这对您来说应该很熟悉：

“12 years of software development experience in one or more general-purpose programming languages.”

“在一种或多种通用编程语言上具有12年的软件开发经验。”

That’s taken directly from a job description for a Staff Engineer at Google.

这直接取自Google的一名工程师的职位描述。

Or maybe you’re looking for your first job out of college, and you see something like this for the entry-level position that you’re looking at:

或者，也许您正在寻找大学毕业后的第一份工作，而您正在寻找的入门级职位会看到类似这样的内容：

“1+ years of software development experience.”

“ 1年以上的软件开发经验。”

Let’s talk about years of experience (YOE) as a metric.

让我们谈谈多年经验(YOE)作为度量标准。

我们为什么要使用YOE？ (Why do we use YOE?)

You’ll often find YOE used to describe minimum requirements for a role. Companies might use it to describe overall development experience (e.g., “3 years of software development experience”), experience with specific programming languages (e.g., “2+ years of experience with Python”), or experience with particular frameworks (e.g., “4+ years of experience with ReactNative”).

您经常会发现YOE用于描述角色的最低要求。 公司可能会用它来描述总体开发经验(例如“ 3年的软件开发经验”)，特定编程语言的经验(例如“ 2年以上的Python经验”)或特定框架的经验(例如“在ReactNative方面有4年以上的经验”)。

The use of YOE as a metric comes from the idea that the longer you do something, the better you get at it. Another way of putting that is “practice makes perfect.” Talking about YOE makes it easy to quantify a candidate’s experience and compare it against others. A hiring manager would feel pretty confident that a candidate with eight years of Android development experience would be a stronger developer than one with only four years.

将YOE用作度量标准的想法是，您做某事的时间越长，您就越能做到。 另一种表达方式是“实践使之完美”。 谈论YOE可以轻松量化候选人的经历并将其与他人进行比较。 招聘经理会非常有信心，拥有八年Android开发经验的候选人将比只有四年的候选人更强大。

In a world in which we’re trying to eliminate bias when it comes to hiring, a metric that is so easy to quantify sounds attractive. In our example above, it’s easy to justify hiring the developer with eight years of experience over the one with only four. In fact, if we were talking about a role that required “6 years of experience with Android development, including Java and Kotlin”, the person with only four years of experience might not even choose to apply.

在一个我们努力消除招聘偏见的世界中，一种易于量化的指标听起来很有吸引力。 在上面的示例中，很容易证明聘用具有八年经验的开发人员，而不是只有四年的经验。 实际上，如果我们谈论的角色需要“拥有6年Android开发经验，包括Java和Kotlin”，那么只有4年经验的人甚至可能不会选择应聘。

So why should we care? If we’re looking for a senior engineer, and we’ve decided that it takes about six years of experience to become one, we shouldn’t care that someone with only four years of experience might not apply. In fact, we’d probably view that as a success! But should we?

那么，为什么我们要关心呢？ 如果我们正在寻找一名高级工程师，并且已经决定要成为一名工程师，则需要大约六年的经验，所以我们不必担心只有四年经验的人可能不会申请。 实际上，我们可能会将其视为成功！ 但是我们应该吗？

为什么我们不应该依靠YOE？ (Why shouldn’t we rely on YOE?)

并非所有路径都是线性的 (Not all paths are linear)

The problem with YOE is that it assumes that all career paths are linear. It assumes that we all learn at the same rate. It assumes that we’re all offered the same learning opportunities. It assumes that we all have the same backgrounds. In short, it assumes a lot!

YOE的问题在于它假设所有职业路径都是线性的。 假设我们所有人的学习速度相同。 假设我们都提供了相同的学习机会。 它假定我们都有相同的背景。 简而言之，它假设很多！

As a direct counter-argument to the idea that “practice makes perfect”, American football coach Vince Lombardi suggests that “only perfect practice makes perfect.”

美式足球教练文斯·伦巴第(Vince Lombardi)强烈反对“实践才能做到完美”这一观点，他认为“只有完美实践才能实现完美”。

“Practice doesn’t make perfect, only perfect practice makes perfect.”

“实践不能完美，只有完美的实践才能完美。”

— Vince Lombardi

—文斯·伦巴第(Vince Lombardi)

What does that mean? Let’s say that I’m trying to memorize my ABC’s. I spend hundreds, even thousands of hours practicing them. But without realizing, I had been practicing “A-B-C-D-E-F-Z”. Unless I had realized my mistake and corrected it, or someone had pointed it out to me, I would still be making that mistake — despite my hours and years of practice. The same thing happens with people’s work experience.

那是什么意思？ 假设我要记住我的ABC。 我花了数百甚至数千小时来练习它们。 但是我没有意识到，我一直在练习“ ABCDEF- Z”。 除非我意识到自己的错误并改正它，或者有人向我指出了错误，否则我仍然会犯该错误-尽管我付出了数小时和多年的实践。 人们的工作经历也会发生同样的事情。

A person might graduate from college and spend 10 years doing contract work where they don’t really have any developers around them to learn from. Or they might be at a company that doesn’t care to develop their junior engineers. Or at a company with senior engineers that don’t really know what they’re doing. In all of those environments, that person probably wouldn’t grow as a software engineer nearly as much or as quickly as a person in a different environment.

一个人可能会从大学毕业，并花10年时间从事合同工作，而实际上他们周围没有开发人员可以向他们学习。 或者他们可能在一家不在乎发展初级工程师的公司中。 或者在一家拥有高级工程师的公司中，他们实际上并不知道自己在做什么。 在所有这些环境中，该人可能不会像在不同环境中的人一样快或几乎一样地成长为软件工程师。

Further, the amount of experience that a person has when they first enter the workforce can vary greatly. Someone who has been doing software development since they were young is going to have more experience coming out of college than someone who only started developing when they took their first CS class. Someone who did internships throughout college or even high school is going to have more experience than someone who didn’t.

此外，一个人首次进入劳动力市场时所拥有的经验量可能会大不相同。 从年轻开始从事软件开发的人比从第一次上CS课才开始开发的人有更多的大学毕业经验。 在整个大学甚至是高中期间都曾实习过的人比没有经历过的人有更多的经验。

On top of that, not everyone learns at the same pace. Even given the same environment and opportunities, some people will take longer to pick up new skills and to level up their current ones.

最重要的是，并不是每个人都能以相同的速度学习。 即使在相同的环境和机会下，有些人也将花费更长的时间来学习新技能并升级他们现有的技能。

Just to be clear, none of these things make one person a better engineer than another. They just mean that those two engineers might take different amounts of time to get to the same level of experience.

需要明确的是，所有这些都不能使一个人成为比另一个人更好的工程师。 他们只是意味着那两位工程师可能花费不同的时间来获得相同的经验水平。

To make things even more complex, you have to factor in people who might be considered more “non-traditional” — people who might have switched careers midway through their life, people who taught themselves how to code, or people who put themselves through coding bootcamps. Some companies even offer programs that help people new to full-time software engineering ramp up quickly.

为了使事情变得更加复杂，您必须考虑那些可能被认为更“非传统”的人-可能在一生中转行职业的人，自学编码的人或从事编码工作的人新手营。 一些公司甚至提供了一些程序来帮助刚接触专职软件工程的新手Swift成长。

Keeping all of these things in mind, it becomes difficult to see years of experience as a useful metric on its own. The person with four years of experience might have been in a work environment where they were encouraged to learn and great mentors. The person with eight years of experience might have been in a work environment where they were on their own and had to teach themselves everything.

牢记所有这些事情，很难将多年的经验本身视为有用的指标。 具有四年经验的人可能曾在工作环境中受到鼓励，他们需要学习和辅导。 具有八年经验的人可能一直在工作环境中，他们一个人就必须自学一切。

并非所有职位都平等 (Not all positions are equal)

As you move up the career ladder, there become more and more types of engineers at your level. If we’re talking about a senior engineer, are we talking about someone who works heads-down to power through complex projects? Are we talking about someone who leads the team, pushing people to drive their projects to completion? Or are we talking about someone who has a lot of experience mentoring junior engineers and really getting the most out of them?

随着您职业发展的步伐，您所在级别的工程师越来越多。 如果我们在谈论高级工程师，那我们是在谈论一个通过复杂的项目努力工作的人吗？ 我们是否在谈论领导团队，推动人们推动其项目完成的人？ 还是我们谈论的是一个在指导初级工程师方面具有丰富经验并真正从中获得最大收益的人？

All of the above are examples of different “flavors” of senior engineers — and it’s not an exhaustive list. So why do we try to reduce it to the number of years of experience they have?

以上所有都是高级工程师不同“口味”的示例-并非详尽列表。 那么，为什么我们尝试将其减少到他们拥有的经验年数呢？

YOE可能会使您的申请人池产生偏差 (YOE can bias your applicant pool)

We talked above about how including YOE as a requirement could prevent qualified candidates from applying if they don’t meet that bar. But more than that, we need to realize that it won’t affect everyone in the same way.

上面我们讨论了将YOE纳入要求是如何防止合格的候选人不符合该标准的。 但不仅如此，我们需要意识到，它不会以相同的方式影响每个人。

Most people have heard some version of: women only apply for a job if they meet 100% of the qualifications, but men will apply for the same job with only 60%. That comes from a report from within Hewlett Packard. And it has often been used as evidence that “women need to have more faith in themselves.”

大多数人都听到过这样的说法：女性只有在达到100％的资格时才申请工作，而男性只有60％才可以从事同一工作。 这来自惠普内部的一份报告。 它经常被用作“妇女需要对自己有更多信心”的证据。

In 2014, the Harvard Business Review conducted a survey of 1,000 men and women. The conclusion? Women were more likely not to “see the hiring process as one where advocacy, relationships, or a creative approach to framing one’s expertise could overcome not having the skills and experiences outlined in the job qualifications”. In short, they were turned away by perceptions of the hiring process, not themselves.

2014年，《哈佛商业评论》对1,000名男女进行了调查 。 结论？ 妇女更有可能不会“将招聘过程视为倡导，建立人际关系或采用创新方法来构筑自己的专业知识的过程，可以克服没有工作资格所概述的技能和经验的过程”。 简而言之，他们是因为对招聘过程而不是自己的看法而拒绝接受。

In fact, this can be broadened to anyone who doesn’t feel like the hiring process is designed for them. That means that you could unknowingly bias your applicant pool against under-represented minorities. Little things like this matter. Words matter.

实际上，这可以扩大到那些不认为招聘过程是为他们设计的。 这意味着您可能会在不知不觉中将自己的申请者偏向于代表性不足的少数族裔。 这样的小事。 话语很重要。

Why? Saying that you’re looking for someone with at least X years of experience is very binary — very black and white. You either have at least X years of experience, or you don’t. And if you don’t, that feels very disqualifying; you don’t meet one of the seemingly most important qualifications and that’s a huge disadvantage to come back from.

为什么？ 说您正在寻找具有至少X年经验的人是非常二元的-非常黑白。 您或者至少有X年的经验，或者没有。 如果您不这样做，那感觉就很不合格； 您没有达到看似最重要的资格之一，而这又是一个巨大的劣势。

一些YOE要求使公司看起来很糟糕 (Some YOE requirements make companies look bad)

It’s one thing for a company to ask for “10+ years of experience” in a programming language like C, which has been around since the 70s. But what if you’re talking about a newer language or framework? Maybe you want someone with “10+ years of iOS development experience”. You know that iOS development is done in Swift these days, so you ask for “10+ years of experience with Swift”. The only problem is that Swift has only been around for about six years.

对于一家公司，要求使用诸如C的编程语言拥有“ 10多年的经验”是一回事，这种语言自70年代就已经存在。 但是，如果您正在谈论更新的语言或框架，该怎么办？ 也许您想要拥有“超过10年的iOS开发经验”的人。 您知道这些天iOS开发是在Swift中完成的，因此您需要“超过10年的Swift使用经验”。 唯一的问题是，Swift仅仅存在了大约六年。

You might think that situations like this are uncommon, but Twitter is full of examples of job descriptions asking for impossible amounts of experience.

您可能会认为这种情况很少见，但Twitter上充满了职位描述的示例，这些示例要求大量的经验。

Not only is this confusing, but it doesn’t create a great impression of the team or company posting the job description.

这不仅令人困惑，而且不会给团队或公司发布职位描述留下深刻的印象。

我们应该怎么做呢？ (What should we do instead?)

Since we use YOE as a shortcut to describe the skills that we’re looking for, we have to spend some time thinking about what we’re actually looking for our prospective employee to do. What will they be doing day-to-day? For a senior iOS engineer, we might come up with the following:

由于我们使用YOE作为描述所需技能的捷径，因此我们必须花一些时间思考我们实际在寻找潜在员工要做的事情。 他们每天会做什么？ 对于高级iOS工程师，我们可能会提出以下建议：

• Writing code day-to-day in a mixture of Swift (90%) and Objective-C (10%)
  每天用Swift(90％)和Objective-C(10％)混合编写代码
• Working with Android and web developers to drive cross-platform parity
  与Android和Web开发人员合作推动跨平台的奇偶校验
• Contributing to app architecture and system design
  致力于应用架构和系统设计
• Breaking down complex projects into milestones, working with others to clarify ambiguity
  将复杂的项目分解为里程碑，与其他人一起澄清歧义
• Mentoring junior engineers, helping them grow as developers
  指导初级工程师，帮助他们成长为开发人员
• Working closely with product, design, and QA partners to ensure the best experience for our users
  与产品，设计和质量检查合作伙伴紧密合作，以确保为用户提供最佳体验
• Writing high-quality automated testing to make sure that our code does exactly what we expect
  编写高质量的自动化测试，以确保我们的代码完全符合我们的期望

The above describes what we might expect from a prospective senior iOS developer. It provides a lot more information to a prospective candidate than just saying “6+ years of iOS development experience”. It helps them envision the work that they would be doing.

上面描述了我们对潜在的高级iOS开发人员的期望。 它为潜在的候选人提供了更多信息，而不仅仅是说“有6年以上的iOS开发经验”。 它可以帮助他们设想自己将要做的工作。

By giving prospective applicants a better idea of what their day-to-day responsibilities would be, it gives them more information as to whether they would be a good fit for that job.

通过使潜在的申请人更好地了解他们的日常职责，可以为他们提供更多有关他们是否适合该职位的信息。

And most importantly, it helps give the impression that they will be evaluated more holistically than just based on their years of experience. The more inviting your job description is, the more people are likely to apply — and the less you’ll alienate potentially great candidates.

而且最重要的是，它给人的印象是，他们的评估将比仅仅根据其多年的经验进行更全面的评估。 职位描述越吸引人，申请的人就越多-越少疏远潜在的优秀候选人。

Do you agree? Is there something that I missed? Please comment below or let me know on Twitter!

你同意吗？ 有什么我想念的吗？ 请在下面发表评论或在Twitter上让我知道！

翻译自: https://medium.com/swlh/lets-stop-talking-about-yoe-3e33da5e2b04