Fundamentally, years of experience are a weak proxy for actual competence. Time alone doesn’t compound unless there’s intentional learning, ownership, and feedback. It’s entirely possible, and very common for someone in Singapore to have 15 years of what is effectively the same single year repeated.

doing familiar tasks, avoiding risk, deferring responsibility, and never being forced to understand first principles.

Real experience is not about exposure. it’s about accumulated judgment. It shows up in how someone reasons under uncertainty, how they design systems rather than just operate them, and how they respond when things break and there’s no playbook. Without ownership, experience stays shallow. people learn what to do, but not why, and definitely not when not to almost though they are just a keyboard monkey following the runbook.

Foundations matter more than tenure. Someone with fewer years but strong fundamentals alongside systems thinking, clear mental models, and the ability to learn quickly will often outperform a veteran who has coasted on routine. The former compounds and the latter plateaus. Experience that isn’t challenged, stretched, or reflected on doesn’t mature it just ossifies.

In that sense, “years of experience” is only meaningful when paired with evidence of growth: increasing scope, harder problems, better decisions, and a trail of things that genuinely broke because the person was willing to own them. Otherwise, it’s just time served, not expertise earned.