Beyond Tenure

As I step into this new role, some call it design engineer, some call it AI builder, the thing we call Years of Experience begins to dilute. Traditionally, YOE is used to define whether a person is senior or staff based on how long they have stayed in the industry or trade. It is a benchmark for HR to sort individuals along a line, and it seems to work from time to time. Rarely do we come across people who exceed it.

However, design engineering is a new role and a harder one to define. For me, being a Design Engineer means solving problems with the design process and owning the implementation in real life. That means one person handling almost the entire SDLC. More importantly, it takes a soul strong enough to understand the code, proactively suggest areas of improvement and fine-tune the details, instead of waiting for feedback and handing over the design.

AI has levelled the playing field a lot for people with YOE. It is easier to tell whether someone’s YOE translates into expertise. Quality beats quantity, and I have seen high performers without the same YOE outperform people with twice their tenure.

You see, all of this requires some experience in practice before hopping into it. Yes, AI has made it easy to explore ideas and generate forms, but what is still lacking is critical thinking and proactiveness, and those are hard to measure. If you are a designer learning to build with AI, by all means go ahead. Just don’t lose the criticality of why, how, and what you know about a project.

With AI, it boils down to things like the hours put into practice, the grit, the personality, the willingness to collaborate and, importantly, the humility to know that YOE doesn’t mean you are the most knowledgeable in the room.

Experience, talent, and competency are much more than how long you have held a job title. They are not a product of time. They come from exposure to different environments, contexts, events, learning, and people. Everyone learns at a different speed, and not everyone makes use of their team in the same way. If it takes 10,000 hours to build mastery, some may take 10 years while others take 5. Years of experience do not give you the right to be the loudest or the smartest in the room. Nor do they quantify your criticality.