“Experience alone is not necessarily the best teacher; it is the slowest, and very likely the most expensive. Ten years of experience is not too valuable if it is one year of experience repeated 10 times.”
One Year Repeated Ten Times
From a January 1962 article by W. F. McMullen in The Engineering Journal, published by the Engineering Institute of Canada and based on a talk he gave at the Institute’s annual meeting in Vancouver the previous spring. McMullen ran engineering personnel at Canadian General Electric, and his question was whose job it is to turn a new graduate into a capable engineer. He divides the work three ways: universities teach the fundamentals and the habit of thinking independently, the engineer owes himself ongoing self-development, and industry owes “the climate for growth.” The quote is aimed at that third party, warning industry not to assume that time on the job will do the teaching by itself.
A decade of service reads like a decade of skill, but the years only count if each one asks a harder question than the last. Keep solving the same problems with the same answers and you have one year of work lived ten times over. That is the gap job postings and promotion cases quietly paper over when they treat years of service as the qualification, as if tenure turned into competence on its own.