Why Bending Spoons favors talent and motivation over experience

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 32:11

   There are so many skills needed in a business like yours, like ours, that obviously you need to divide and conquer in any case. I've never been a big fan of, I mean, we do value experience, but I think we value experience a lot less than most people. I believe that, yes, being there, done that helps, but there are a few big buts. The first one is the world changes pretty fast. So I'm not exactly certain that someone who did something seven years ago, that still applies all that well.

2. 32:44

   and there is a huge risk that people will be blind as to the new context because they did it that way and they will just try to paste whatever solution they applied before. So maybe you buy some good, but you also buy a lot of bad. I'm not sure which of the two is stronger. For a company like Benny Spoons, also we have such a, as far as I can tell, distinctive culture that we found that every time we hired someone, almost every time we hired someone very experienced, they struggled to adapt.

3. 33:11

   We're so hands-on, no politics, radically candid. Everybody needs to carry their own weight. And it doesn't translate well. Often people who have been successful at large tech companies, they tend to have a different style to leadership, which may very well be optimal at those companies. I don't know, but it's not at Bending Spoon. So we also need to account for the cost of that cultural change, which sometimes doesn't even happen.

4. 33:38

   And if it does, it takes a long time. And last but not least, I find that generally people lose motivation as they gain experience. And so you need to consider whether it's better to have someone with 20 years of experience, but I don't know, 6 out of 10 motivation, or someone with 2 years of experience, but 10 out of 10 motivation. I find often the latter is better. It depends on the situation. So we're generally, we're not big on experience.

5. 34:06

   We have hired experienced people occasionally. Has that changed as you've scaled? Have you changed your mind at all on that? Or you're like, actually, no. Yeah, interesting. No, and I may be wrong. Look, we have tried. It's not that we never hired experienced people. We have hired some experienced people with great success. It's not that we were completely close-minded regarding that. But no, we keep investing in students or new graduates or people with a couple years of experience where we think that we can really help them mold their skill set and professional culture in the way that we believe.

6. 34:39

   will best serve them and the company in the long run. And also, there is a trade-off between talent and experience in a competitive labor market. And experience, we can provide it to you. We just need to be a little bit patient. Talent, we can't. And so we focus more on talent than experience. So I'll consider we're happy with this. We wouldn't change it necessarily. But we have encountered difficult situations sometimes where maybe we have a 25-year-old lead engineer