--- title: "When \"experienced\" stopped being a selling point" description: "Experience is being unbundled and repriced: why judgment got expensive, the interview shift from headcount to carrying capacity, and what to do about it." image: https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/experience-cover-en.png --- [Nobu Sato](https://nobusato.jp/en?hsLang=en) [Home](https://nobusato.jp/en?hsLang=en) [Profile](https://nobusato.jp/en/profile?hsLang=en) [Articles](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog?hsLang=en) [Contact](https://nobusato.jp/en/contact?hsLang=en) [日本語](https://nobusato.jp/ja/blog?hsLang=en) [English](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog?hsLang=en) [中文](https://nobusato.jp/zh/blog?hsLang=en) [Career](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog/tag/career) # When "experienced" stopped being a selling point ![Bar chart showing judgment rising in value while cases seen and learned patterns decline in market price](https://nobusato.jp/hubfs/experience-cover-en.png) Cases seen Patterns built Feel for a situation Three things travel together inside one word. Dotted is where each sat before; solid is what still carries a price. Ten years of experience is worth less this year than it was last year. Not because the market is cold. Because the thing buyers are paying for has changed. An engineer came to me last week asking where to go next. Mid thirties, solid record. Halfway through he added something himself: "I haven't really learned anything new in a few years. I've just gotten faster at the work." He said it casually. I did not take it casually. Five years ago that sentence was a selling point. This year it is a problem. Here is what I think changed. ## Experience is being unbundled When we say someone is experienced, we are bundling three things: the cases they have seen, the patterns they have built, and their feel for a situation. The three travelled together, so years stood in for skill and skill stood in for price. The bundle is coming apart. On cases seen, no human competes with a model. Patterns, once written down, become documents and prompts. They copy, they distribute, and in a new hire's hands they reproduce seventy or eighty percent of the result. Both of those are repricing downward, faster than most people assume. The third has held. Knowing when to stop, why a number looks wrong, that a conversation about price is actually a conversation about face. That still lives in people and does not move. The uncomfortable part is how small a share of most ten year careers the third thing occupies. That is not really the individual's fault. Organizations were designed around fluency. Deliver reliably, don't overthink it, get paid more as you get faster. That trade was fair for a long time. What changed is the arithmetic on the buying side. If the first two are available more cheaply, only the third is left to buy, and buyers start looking hard at it. So if your applications are landing worse this year, the market may not be the reason. The yardstick may be. ## Judgment got expensive, and models being unreliable has nothing to do with it The usual argument is that models hallucinate, so a human has to check the work. That argument gets weaker every quarter. Error rates keep falling, and staking your position on someone else's defect is a poor bet. The real reason sits elsewhere. When the cost of doing something falls, the number of things you can do explodes. A proposal used to take two weeks, so four a quarter was the ceiling, which meant four choices a quarter. Now five come out in an afternoon. Producing is no longer the bottleneck. **Choosing which one** is. For you that means your value moved from "can you build it" to "do you know which one to build." Fluency gets you the first. It does not get you the second. This is the change I feel most in my own week. I used to spend most of my time making things. Now I spend most of it deciding which directions not to pursue. The second is harder work. Building has a finish line. Killing a direction has none, and if you kill the wrong one nobody notices at the time. Two quarters later the business numbers answer for you. ## The yardstick in the interview room changed Interviews used to end up at headcount. Ten people makes you a manager, fifty makes you a director. That yardstick worked everywhere because it matched how organizations processed information. One person's bandwidth is finite, so you add layers. Hierarchy was a function of headcount. That premise is being removed. What gets measured now is how large a thing you can carry without needing people assigned to you. In practice it shows up as a few questions. - Give the same work to you and to someone else, and how many fewer people do you need - In what you delivered, which parts did you judge and which did you take from a tool and pass through - If you disappear for three months, does your area keep running The third one carries the most weight, and most candidates answer it backwards. They say they would hand over very thoroughly. They think they are demonstrating conscientiousness. What the room hears is that every judgment lives inside this person's head, and hiring them adds a single point of failure. The answer that lands is the other one. I wrote down what my decisions rest on, so the work runs to the same standard when I am not there. That sentence does more for you than twenty direct reports. One caveat. If your current employer still measures you the old way, there is no need to panic. The old yardstick will be around for years. It sets your title now. The new one sets your price in three years. Those two do not move together. ## The part I have not worked out I have been saying judgment is what gets paid for. So where does judgment come from? Mine came from failing. Proposals that missed, people I read wrong, deals that fell apart. That is how the feel for a situation accumulated. All of it happened in my first years, inside work that looks elementary and wasteful from here. That work is disappearing. Someone who joined last month delivers in week one what used to take half a year. The quality is fine. What I cannot tell is what they learned on the way. They skipped the slow route, and they may have skipped the growth that was bundled into the slow route. None of the standard answers satisfies me. Keep some manual work as training, people say. The logic holds, but ask a smart person to do by hand what a tool does and their first thought is that this company has a problem. Put junior people in decision rooms earlier, others say. I lean toward that one, though sitting in a room and carrying the consequence are still far apart. If you are at that stage, I have one suggestion and it is not clever. Go ask for the small things that require you to decide. Deciding an interface, deciding whether to advance a candidate, that size is fine. The size is not the point. The point is whether someone is waiting on your answer and whether you wear it when the answer is wrong. No tool substitutes for that and there is no fast version. I am still watching this one. If a cohort of young people with excellent judgment shows up in three to five years, I was worrying over nothing and the path just changed shape. If they do not, the industry hits a point where it is short not of hands but of people who can call it. ## What to actually do Starting with what not to bother with. Do not spend real money on AI certifications. Tools turn over every six months, so the certificate goes stale before the tuition pays back. Do not build a plan around learning a specific tool either. That is a weekend, not a career strategy. Two things are worth the time, and neither is easy. **Write down what is in your head.** I have been at this for over half a year, on and off, and I am not done. Take what your judgments rest on, your patterns, the holes you fell into, and turn them into structured text a machine can read. The painful part is that you often cannot explain why you decided something, and writing it is how you discover it was instinct. What comes after compounds. Once your material can be called by a tool, you stop being someone who does the work and become someone who owns a method. It also shows directly in an interview, which beats any self assessment you could write. **Practice asking.** The gap between people getting good output and people getting poor output is almost entirely the clarity of the question. It sounds like a soft skill. It trains, and it overlaps heavily with writing. That is why I weight a candidate's writing more than I did two years ago. Not the prose. Whether they can take something tangled and make it clear. You can test yourself against the same standard. Beyond those two there is a harder decision. Does your current role contain anything you genuinely have to decide? If it does not, no amount of tool learning moves the part that matters. At that point, changing seats belongs on the table, even at a flat title, even a level down. I know that is easy to type and hard to do. There is a conversation at home and there is pride. Still, at the current rate of change, three years in a role that never asks you to decide costs more than one level down. The level is a one time hit. The wrong seat compounds. ## Back to the engineer I told him to put aside the search for a company with a newer stack and answer one question first. In the last three years, what did you work on where the answer only existed because someone asked you? He thought about it for a long time and came up with one. Just one, but it was specific, and he could explain why he judged it the way he did at the time. Start there and widen out, I said. That is the only part of him that does not transfer to anyone else. My own answer is not flattering either. Twenty years in, when I break it apart, the portion that does not transfer is smaller than I assumed. Not a pleasant conclusion. Better now than later, and there is still time to fill it in. One question I have not resolved, which I will leave here. Within one person, what ratio of judgment to fluency means you are standing on solid ground through this shift? I suspect it varies a lot by function, and that engineering and commercial roles are not the same number. If you have an answer, I would like to hear it. [← All articles](https://nobusato.jp/en/blog?hsLang=en) [Get in touch →](https://nobusato.jp/en/contact?hsLang=en) ## Writing about launching in Japan, in three languages. 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