The older I get and the longer I work, the more I find this question is on my mind: How much does experience matter in the 2008 workplace?

It’s something I’ve thought about a lot because I’ve always believed that work experience—a solid and meaningful track record of relevant employment—was a good thing and a positive differentiator. Smart employers generally want people with good backgrounds and solid, focused experience, right?

Well, I used to think that was the case, and it certainly was for me until the economic downturn that followed the bursting of the dot-com bubble eight years ago. I had been working as a vice president at a well-known but fatally flawed San Francisco dot-com, and when the company closed its doors, I thought I would have no problem finding a new job, especially given my varied work background and deep experience.

But then I found out something while applying for more than 130 jobs: My deep and varied experience meant something very different to me than it did to prospective employers. I thought it meant that I had a savvy and time-tested management style that would clearly benefit a new employer. Problem was, all those prospective employers saw it differently. Where I saw experience as a positive, they saw it as a negative because my experience, although positive, brought along a big negative—a greater expectation for higher pay.

For the first time in my life, I found that my experience wasn’t a positive, but was in fact a negative, holding me back from a job. This was crazy, I thought. Wasn’t experience worth more salary, given all that I brought to the table? Well, it wasn’t, and all too many potential employers had no problem telling me so.

I thought about this today while reading a New York Times article about how newspapers all over America are getting rid of their most experienced and best talent –critical human capital—in a seemingly futile attempt to cut their costs and regain some semblance of financial equilibrium. Times media writer David Carr points to another recent example of a company that tried to do this—electronics retailer Circuit City, where former CEO Phillip Schoonover thought doing this was a winning workforce strategy.

It wasn’t, of course, as I’ve pointed out on numerous occasions, and Schoonover was finally shown the door for his managerial folly. But Mr. Circuit City wasn’t the only one who seems to think that getting rid of top talent and the most experienced workers is the way to business nirvana. Carr points to Tribune Co. chairman Sam Zell, who seems to relish the opportunity to get rid of  as many experienced journalists as he can, generally in as demeaning and mean-spirited a way as he possibly can.

This is more than a philosophic argument, of course, because the best workplaces are a mix of talent with many different experiences from many different age groups, races, genders and backgrounds. The real art of management is assembling a staff with the right mix of all of these things, giving them the resources they need, and then encouraging and leading them to do their best work. And having experienced workers who can add savvy thinking and much-needed work perspective is a critical component, even if idiots like Phillip Schoonover and Sam Zell don’t seem to think so.

There is huge pressure on businesses everywhere to cut costs, and that means a seemingly endless stream of layoff announcements nearly every day. It’s an incredibly grim economy, as we saw in the October jobs report, but job cuts need to be done with a scalpel, and not mindlessly with a meat ax, as preferred by the Schoonovers and Zells of the world.

Experience matters because experience can bring smart, time-tested thinking to difficult business problems—the kind of thinking that can help organizations perform better during a time of economic upheaval. Slashing staff takes no real talent. 

It’s a stupid management trick that is not only shortsighted, but oftentimes just makes the situation worse. That’s what Circuit City, now in Chapter 11 bankruptcy, found out, and it’s something many other shortsighted executives will undoubtedly find out too.