Stop hiring based on "Years of Experience."
Use The 1-to-5 Competency Scale Frame instead.
We all know the struggle: You hire a senior dev with 10 years of experience who performs like a junior, or you meet an intern who runs circles around the team.
"Years of experience" is a false indicator. Here is a better way to assess technical talent: In a scale of 1-to-5 frame.
Also, 5/5 isn’t always the goal.
Level 1 (Novice): This is basically everyone. You have a technology degree, you can sit down with a tutorial, stumble your way through, and get "Hello World" running. That is where all of us are for almost every technology in the world. Don't care how much experience you have; there are more technologies out there that you've never used than ones you have.
Level 2 (Competent): Can build things, but lacks best practices. Good for non-critical tasks.
Level 3 (The Expert): The daily driver. Knows the reference material by heart. This is your solid "Senior" dev who keeps the lights on.
Level 4 (The Pioneer): Infectious enthusiasm. They push boundaries, answer Stack Overflow questions, and innovate. If a technology is your competitive advantage, hire this person.
Level 5 (The Wizard): Book authors and compiler writers. They know the theory perfectly but can sometimes over-engineer or struggle with practical product delivery.
About our hiring
Hiring is broken because we don't know how to ask for what we want. If you need a SQL database maintained, a Level 2 or 3 is perfect. If you are building a high-frequency trading engine, you need a Level 4.
Stop looking for "10 years of experience" and start looking for the right level of competence frame for the specific problem you are solving.
Use The 1-to-5 Competency Scale Frame instead.
We all know the struggle: You hire a senior dev with 10 years of experience who performs like a junior, or you meet an intern who runs circles around the team.
"Years of experience" is a false indicator. Here is a better way to assess technical talent: In a scale of 1-to-5 frame.
Also, 5/5 isn’t always the goal.
Level 1 (Novice): This is basically everyone. You have a technology degree, you can sit down with a tutorial, stumble your way through, and get "Hello World" running. That is where all of us are for almost every technology in the world. Don't care how much experience you have; there are more technologies out there that you've never used than ones you have.
Think, most above average self thought and CS grad kinds. It is perfectly reasonable to acknowledge, "I'm a one in that." It just means I need my hand held by every reference source I can find.
Level 2 (Competent): Can build things, but lacks best practices. Good for non-critical tasks.
Think, Mark Zuckerberg (Meta - Early Days): In the dorm room days, he hacked PHP together to make Facebook work. It wasn't elegant, but it shipped. Kevin Systrom (Instagram): Taught himself Python at night to build the prototype (Burbn). It worked, but he needed Mike Krieger (Level 3/4) to scale it.
Level 3 (The Expert): The daily driver. Knows the reference material by heart. This is your solid "Senior" dev who keeps the lights on.
Think, Andrew "Boz" Bosworth (Meta): Started as an engineer, created News Feed, rose to CTO. Solid, rigorous engineering background. Mike Krieger (Instagram): The technical co-founder who actually scaled Instagram’s backend when it exploded in popularity. Bret Taylor (Google Maps/Salesforce): Co-created Google Maps. deeply technical product builder who writes production-grade software.
Level 4 (The Pioneer): Infectious enthusiasm. They push boundaries, answer Stack Overflow questions, and innovate. If a technology is your competitive advantage, hire this person.
Think, Jeff Dean (Google): Co-created MapReduce, BigTable, Spanner, and TensorFlow. He builds the systems that run the internet. Kelsey Hightower (Google/Kubernetes): The face of "teaching tech." He didn't just write code; he made Kubernetes understandable for the entire world. Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI/Tesla): One of the few who can actually write the code for massive AI agents and explain it so a Level 2 can understand it. Dan Abramov (Meta/React): Changed frontend development forever with Redux and his work on React. A true force multiplier for UI devs.
Level 5 (The Wizard): Book authors and compiler writers. They know the theory perfectly but can sometimes over-engineer or struggle with practical product delivery.
Think, Guido van Rossum: The creator of Python. Bjarne Stroustrup: The creator of C++. He knows the language better than anyone, but you probably don't want him writing your simple web scraper.
About our hiring
Hiring is broken because we don't know how to ask for what we want. If you need a SQL database maintained, a Level 2 or 3 is perfect. If you are building a high-frequency trading engine, you need a Level 4.
Stop looking for "10 years of experience" and start looking for the right level of competence frame for the specific problem you are solving.
😁1
Framing best poker player
Phil Ivey The GOAT?
or
Daniel Negreanu?
or
Alan Keating?
of course not Phil Hellmuth
Phil Ivey The GOAT?
or
Daniel Negreanu?
or
Alan Keating?
of course not Phil Hellmuth
question the question
brainstorming has been around for a long time
Framestorming is different. Framestorming is about formulating the problem.
brainstorming is about solving a problem. Framestorming is what we do when we don't know what the problem is.
until we have a problem framed right we don't know what the key decisions are. Once we get the right frame then we can start brainstorming for creative alternatives and new strategies. Framestorming has to happen before brainstorming.
brainstorming has been around for a long time
Framestorming is different. Framestorming is about formulating the problem.
brainstorming is about solving a problem. Framestorming is what we do when we don't know what the problem is.
until we have a problem framed right we don't know what the key decisions are. Once we get the right frame then we can start brainstorming for creative alternatives and new strategies. Framestorming has to happen before brainstorming.
❤2
Framing skeptics and underdogs.
History isn't written by the skeptics.
History was made by the underdogs.
History isn't written by the skeptics.
History was made by the underdogs.
Product market-fit is fine and all.
But what pain dies the second your product shows up at the market?
Product pain-fit frame
But what pain dies the second your product shows up at the market?
Product pain-fit frame