in praise of young guns

While it's a little hard to tell from the OSAF "People" page, it 
looks like OSAF is populated with people who have years and years of 
absolutely fantastic experience.  This worries me just a little.

No, I'm not saying that younger programmers think faster or work 
harder.  I think that attitude is both not necessarily true *and* 
insulting.

Young programmers are a pain to shepherd  -- they thrash about and 
knock over the china cabinet -- but play some important roles:

+ Messengers.  Because junior people are always bothering people, 
asking stupid questions, they spread information and trigger 
discussions that unveil problems.
	Junior: What color should the thwizbak be?
	Senior #1: Green.  Now stop bothering me.
	(Time passes)
	Junior: What color should the fromblepuck be?
	Senior #2: Blue, to match the thwizbak.
	Junior: But, but but... Senior #1 said that the thwizbak should be
		green!
	Senior #2:  She said *WHAT*???  My whole architecture is predicated
		on it being blue!
	(Senior #2 stomps off and gets into a big argument over green or blue,
	which turns out to stem from different interpretations of a
	poorly-worded 3rd-party spec.  The third party is called in, and
	everyone finally agrees that the thwizbak should be yellow.)
Good tools for communication can facilitate senior folks talking to 
each other, but junior people help bring up points that they *should* 
talk about.

+ Paradigm shifters.  While experienced people have very valuable 
instincts about code, business, and people, sometimes not having 
those instincts can be valuable.  For example, I could never have 
started Google.  I come from an era when computing resources were 
scarce.   I would have never had the idea of stringing hundreds or 
thousands of computers together because all my instincts said that 
computing resources were scarce.  (The first computer I ever used 
filled two rooms; the memory upgrade for the second filled a truck.)

+ Scut workers.  I don't care what the job is, there is always some 
mind-numbing, tedious, unsexy work to do.  For senior people, it's 
just tedious.  For junior people, even this unsexy work can be 
somewhat interesting because of the novelty.  Having a junior person 
to do the scut work can be a win for both parties.

Just something for y'all to think about.  No reply needed.
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