Re: in praise of young guns

For what it's worth, I might appear older to you, but I still feel like 
I did when I was younger. I prefer to hire a mix of ages and you may be 
happy to know that the first person we hired after my arrival at OSAF 
was just out of school (Jed). You might also notice that the job 
application we posted for our engineering position intentionally didn't 
include a requirement for number of years of experience.

John Anderson

Kaitlin Duck Sherwood wrote:

> 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.
> _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
>
> Open Source Applications Foundation "Process" mailing list
> http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/process


_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Open Source Applications Foundation "Process" mailing list
http://lists.osafoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/process