Experience

One of the best ways to discern whether someone is experienced is to see if they know what to do, what’s acceptable to do, and conversely (maybe more importantly), what’s not acceptable to do. This wisdom is not easy to come by, as these are fundamentally “opinions.”

In politics, there’s a concept called the “Overton Window”, which states that there are a number of topics and ideas that are “acceptable” to the main stream population at any given time. This framework is true in business as well, e.g. narratives around cloud, frameworks, etc.

If someone is experienced, they’ll be aware of the Overton Window for their domain. They’re also likely to have strong opinions about it. In other words, experienced people understand the meta.