Why Work Experience Is a Scam

I have wasted too much of my life navigating the job market.

I’ve applied to thousands of jobs for which I was overqualified because I possessed the knowledge and skill required to do them and never heard back.

Many of the companies I applied to never responded because they were advertising jobs that did not exist - thereby opening themselves up to class action lawsuits because of their job fraud.

Those who responded often gaslighted me by pretending that I needed an arbitrary amount of experience and education to be hired for the positions to which I had applied. And, because I work in cybersecurity, which is a notoriously difficult field to enter due to the experience requirements hiring managers impose on applicants, this problem was especially pronounced.

However, I was eventually able to break into the field and secure my employment. Upon entering my role, I discovered that the tasks assigned to me were so trivial that a teenager could perform them. Later, I ascended into a better role with another firm, and my job there was even more accessible - although it had stricter educational and experiential requirements for entry.

I used my free time to reflect on how absurdly high the hurdles I needed to cross were and how fortunate I was to overcome the unnecessary requirements imposed upon me.

While doing so, I realized several lies I had been taught about work experience. Addressing this lie in a public forum, such as YouTube, would be beneficial because many people are denied employment and promotion because they lack work experience. We must address and understand the lie used to sustain their suffering if we are ever going to alleviate it.

The Lies of Work Experience

The first lie is that you need work experience to perform the duties of a job at a professional level. And it is easy to prove this is a lie by simply thinking about the topic for any length of time. The following thought experiment will help demonstrate it:

Suppose that two people were entrusted to be accountants. The first person was an angelic being who materialized out of nothing and had perfect knowledge of all accounting practices and the character needed to fulfill the duties of an accountant. Meanwhile, the second person had worked as an accountant for 20 years. Still, he was incompetent and corrupt across all relevant domains, and he had managed to avoid termination because he was either well-liked by his employer or could pass the blame for his failures onto others.

Now, which do you suppose would be the superior accountant?

The perfect accountant with no work experience or the moronic psychopath with 20 years under his belt?

Well, if you’re sane, then you’ll pick the former, but if you’re a baby boomer or a hiring manager, then you’ll like the disabled psychopath on account of his experience.

Because to be a good accountant, you don’t need experience.

Instead, you need to be good at accounting.

The fact that the second person had managed to be an incompetent psychopath for a long time would not mean that he was good at accounting.

Objections to the Above

Of course, some low-IQ people will say that you need the experience to become good at a thing. This is also a lie. And it is a lie in both of its plausible interpretations.

First, we know that having work experience is not a guarantor of competence in a job because baby boomers exist and participate in the job market. Many people in this population have retained their jobs for quite a long time, yet they have yet to attain significant success within their field.

Many are either incompetent or mediocre, so a motivated newcomer could plausibly surpass them in a short amount of time.

The second interpretation, which holds that a skilled person must have performed the acts of their skill and therefore have experience, is also a lie because of how the word experience is commonly understood. To better understand my point, consider the case of two aspiring bodybuilders.

The first bodybuilder is rather unimpressive. He goes to the gym once monthly and spends one hour inside each time. He has done this for ten years and lives on a diet of cheeseburgers and pudding.

Meanwhile, the second bodybuilder exercises in the gym for five hours daily. He keeps to a strict workout regimen, eats 100 grams of protein daily, and toughens himself up by eating a bowl of nails for breakfast each morning - and without any milk. He has done this for two years.

Now, of the two bodybuilders, the first has more experience, but he is inept, and the second has much less experience but is far more worthy of the title.

How to Measure Experience

And this proves the significant problem of experience: its unit of measurement is wrong.

Experience is measured in time, yet it should be measured in deeds. More specifically, it should be measured in deeds that enhance a person’s skill in the area of the experience.

And a person who gets good quickly will be far better than someone who sucked for a long time - and still does.

Experience and the Law of Diminishing Returns

Then again, some people may claim that if two people with similar levels of competence and commitment work in the same position, the one who has been there longer should be the better performer.

And I agree - up to a point. Because although the person with more experience might be the better performer for a time, that edge will disappear because of the law of diminishing returns. To better understand this, consider the act of blinking one’s own eyes.

I can blink my eyes. I am 30, so I have been blinking for 30 years. I have 30 years of experience blinking my eyes. Yet I am not better at blinking now than I was when I was 20 or 10, And I will not be better at blinking when I am 50. Because blinking is a skill that is learned and mastered almost immediately, and once your skill cap is reached, you do not improve at it.

And most jobs are like blinking. You develop skills in those jobs until you reach your skill cap. You cease to improve at that point, and further experience will not lead to increased performance. So, although experience may be valuable, it ceases to matter after reaching a certain level. And the skill caps for most jobs can be reached relatively quickly.

Moreover, time spent in a job after the skill cap is reached cannot yield increased performance. If anything, it makes the employee worse because they can set their brain on autopilot after attaining a certain level of competence; many succumb to this temptation and, when they do, let their mental faculties stagnate. In so doing, they become less competent than a highly motivated newcomer who has not chosen to rest on their laurels.

This is why people who have spent 20 years working in a job they mastered in five years should not be respected. The opposite is true. They should be derided because they spent the last 15 years of their life stagnating. Yet we observe these people in real life, and they often believe their extended complacency is admirable.

How deluded are they!

Empirical Proof that Experience is Bupkes

I have thus far refuted the lie of necessary work experience through deductive reasoning and appeals to personal observation. These are sufficient to convince me, but I know some people will pretend to require empirical evidence to believe as I do.

This is an immature and fake requirement presented by people who are so preoccupied with pretending to be clever that they have forsaken the use of their brains. Still, it is also a requirement that has been met - several times.

The first time the lie of necessary work experience was empirically refuted was in 1988 when a team of researchers published their discovery of the law of diminishing returns and its influence on job performance in the Journal of Applied Psychology.

A second investigation conducted in 1995 and published in the Journal of Personnel Psychology corroborated the first results and found that time spent with a particular company was more important in determining success than general work experience.

A third, conducted in 1998 and published in the Psychological Bulletin, reinforced the conclusions of the preceding two studies and the conclusions I had previously deduced. It held that general cognitive ability, a function of IQ and character, better predicts job performance than experience.

So, the conclusions about the irrelevance of work experience that we can easily observe and deduce are also reinforced by social scientists.

Why It Might Appear Otherwise

Now, I can easily anticipate some pushback from people who believe that experience is essential because they have observed competence from experienced people and incompetence from inexperienced ones. Understandably, these observations might trick someone, but the argument is malformed.

Although there are experienced, competent people, there are also experienced, incompetent people, and although there are unqualified and inexperienced people, there are also those who are unusually skilled.

We would expect to see this if there was no positive or negative correlation between work experience and competence. So, this counterclaim is not a counter but a verification from personal experience that my empirical observation is correct.

The Bone I Will Throw

However, there is a case wherein experience is valuable, and what I hinted at before, I will clearly state here: experience is practical when the person who possesses it is reasonably competent and motivated when the field in which the experience is held is complex enough to have a noticeable learning curve, where the difficulty is a property of the field itself and not of the organizations wherein the field is practiced, and when the possessor has not encountered the law of diminishing returns.

When these properties align, then experience matters.

Why People Tell The Lie of Necessary Experience

So, we know work experience is overblown and bupkes. We can prove it empirically through deductive reasoning, verify it empirically, and know it from our lived experiences. Moreover, the apparent lie that work experience is needed for most jobs is used to damage the prospects of job-seekers and career-oriented people. So, it is both prudent and charitable to discard the lie altogether.

However, worthless people continue to tell the lie and, in so doing, erect hurdles for their fellow man when they could easily choose not to. In so doing, they make life a little bit more hellish for others and, eventually, for themselves.

And I attribute this sociopathy to three sources:

Parrotry

The first is parrotry. And by parrotry, I mean the tendency for low-IQ and lazy people to repeat cliches and buzzwords because they cannot be bothered to think of things to say. Most people who pay lip service to the importance of experience only do so because they observe others doing so and repeat what they’ve heard. By the repetitions of the parrots, the lie of necessary experience proliferates through the population.

However, the parrots merely repeat - they do not create. Therefore, although parrotry explains why the lie is sustained, it fails to identify the origin. For that, a different explanation is needed, and the easiest way to acquire it is to ask:

Cui Bono?

Who benefits from the lie of necessary experience?

I also identify two groups that benefit from the lie: losers and baby boomers.

I will address the losers first.

Loser Cope

A large population of superfluous people exists. Many people do not have a single achievement to their name. They never earned a doctorate, wrote a book, composed a song, patented an invention, mastered a skill, cultivated a virtue, achieved a tremendous athletic accomplishment, or did anything noteworthy. They are utterly worthless and incompetent across all domains and can never feel a sense of self-worth by pointing to their achievements because they don’t have any.

Most people belong to this group. And they want to feel like they’re worth something. So, they derive their sense of self-worth from things that are not achievements. Some people are proud of their height, which they didn’t need to earn. Others are proud of their intelligence, which is primarily genetic, too. Women like to draw their sense of importance from their relationships with people who are better than themselves.

And losers who stayed in their dead-end jobs for 20 years because they lacked the ambition and initiative to leave draw their sense of self-worth from their experience. They inflate the importance of experience so they can more easily live with themselves and, in so doing, reinforce the lie. This, in turn, makes life more difficult for people who have been barred from the job market on account of a fake experience deficiency.

They are being held to the lies that the losers told themselves and suffer unnecessarily.

But the people who are unable to progress in their lives because of the lying losers are also stopped by our sociopathic elders, the baby boomers — many of whom belong to the population of losers and yet should still be treated as a distinct group because even successful boomers repeat the lie of necessary experience.

Age-Based Discrimination in Favor of Baby Boomers

Baby boomers repeat the lie because it is a form of age-based discrimination directed against the young. We see this most easily when we observe a 25-year-old being rejected from a job for which he might perform reasonably well. The hiring managers pretended he needed two decades of prior experience to occupy it.

But how can a man in his twenties have 20 years of experience in a job?

Child labor laws make such a situation impossible.

However, it is much easier for a man who has occupied the workforce for 40 years to possess 20 years of experience as assigned to the job.

So, experience requirements discriminate against the young in favor of the old.

From this, we can conclude that civil rights laws should treat such age-based discrimination as a felony because they do so in similar cases. However, this judgment has not been forthcoming, nor will it be, because experience is a form of age-based discrimination that favors the boomers.

And, because boomers are what they are, they are pleased to laud the triumphs of civil rights while conveniently ignoring it when doing so happens to suit their interests - and especially if it sabotages their children.

So although civil rights law would, and could, and should prevent the age-based discrimination that masquerades as an experience requirement, if its most fervent advocates truly believed it, they do not, so it does not.

Thus, the younger generations will continue to suffer the thinly veiled violation of their civil rights that is the lie of necessary work experience until the day finally comes when enough boomers have died that their progeny can finally assert themselves.

And when that day comes, we will prove ourselves better than the boomers and discard the lie.

Of course, some may claim that the jobs for which so much experience has been prescribed genuinely require it. But we know this is a lie because most jobs of this sort are managerial positions that are currently being replaced by artificial intelligence - and an AI has even less experience than a 25-year-old.

Furthermore, many companies fail, and their management is always to blame. They are guilty of failure because they misused resources or failed to overcome their businesses' challenges.

And you most certainly do not need decades of experience to run a company into the ground. Indeed, a teenager is just as capable of mismanaging a business as an incompetent loser who managed to fail his way upward for thirty years. And you can pay the teenager less.

So, quite insanely, it is a wise decision to hire a teenager to manage a failing company in the middle of its collapse than hiring someone with many years of experience - the lower cost helps the firm stay afloat for just a bit longer.

What to Do Now

Now, thus far, I have introduced the lie of necessary experience. I have proven that it is a lie through deductive reasoning and analogy. I have also addressed three empirical studies reinforcing the position, which I determined through deduction and then corroborated from experience.

I have also identified the lie’s origin and described how it is sustained.

Then, I provided a frame with which people can more easily understand the damaging effects of the lie.

I have also given a reason for the failure of existing legislation to prevent age-based discrimination, which masquerades as an experience requirement.

So, I’ve done a pretty good job explaining my position. It is at this point that others would terminate their tirade because they are losers who enjoy being miserable and are disinterested in finding real solutions to real problems.

But I am not like them.

I do not want to gasp and gawk at the sight and the smell of the swamp.

Nor do I want to present implausible solutions to create the illusion that I want to fix the problem to avoid criticism for failing to provide one.

I want to genuinely solve the problem of the lie so others will not need to suffer unnecessarily — as I and many others have.

So what do I propose we do?

I have one solution that is both quick and effective. However, if I share it, I will be removed from the platform because of its hate speech policies. So, I do not express it in words, spoken or written, but I will keep it engraved in the stone of my heart.

My other solution is more straightforward to accept and enact. It is a set of three simple changes to our vocabulary.

1. First, instead of using the word experience, use the word competence. Do not say that a person needs experience to perform a task. Instead, say they need competence. This is a more truthful statement because a highly experienced and incompetent person is unlikely to accomplish any given task at a professional level.
   
   But a competent person might.

2. Second, instead of saying a recruiter claimed you needed more experience, say that they pretended you required more experience. This is an equally true statement that addresses the role dishonest hiring managers and recruiters have in propagating the lie that is defrauding half the population.

3. And third, commit the phrase lie of necessary experience to your memory. This is the name of the lie, and remembering it helps us confront it. Feel free to drop it in conversation, online or offline, and defend it by asserting that competence is more valuable than experience. That experience is a poor proxy for competence.

With these three changes, we will combat the malice of our elders more quickly and begin to repair the damage they’ve done to our social institutions, the job market, intergenerational trust, the workplace, and more-or-less everything else.

Call to Action

Before I end this message, I will clarify why I chose to address this topic.

The work experience problem is one of many plaguing the collapsing West, and people who suffer it do so acutely. They suffer other issues in other ways - and many can be traced to the same societal decay — like a collapsing house falling apart in different places. And most of us cannot combat the collapse because we are atomized and impotent. So, it is becoming increasingly necessary for us to find communities and support networks to aid us during the dark times ahead.

Some groups already supposedly serve this purpose, but they are often anemic and run by sociopaths, narcissists, and charlatans who vampirize those who trusted them. Moreover, their organizing principles are poor.

So, I created a model for a new type of community, which I call a guild, that people can join. I will briefly describe it as combining a trade union and an art commune in which a shared artistic vision unifies people. The guilds will be reliable support networks that the legions of lost people can turn to for guidance without worry of exploitation.

I am building Elenarda, the Space Guild, to be the first. Our members will enjoy a community that will help them endure the dark times ahead, we will aid one another in their job search, we will create our own culture to replace the decaying one we inhabit, and we will prove ours is the right way forward for the many disaffected and despairing people who populate the West.

And we need you.

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This has been Gene of the Space Guild.

End transmission.