I qualified it as "all of the 20-year-old whizzes <i>I know</i>" very carefully. Clearly, I do not know them all. Equally clearly, the stereotype I describe can not be blindly applied. "Whizzes" is not extraneous either. Many 20-year-olds are perfectly competent and may be slower or less experienced but don't suffer from this pattern.<p>However, as impressed as you may be by people with three years of experience, it's still not ten years of experience. (Or twenty.)<p>May I also point out that you casually assume the other side of the stereotype: 'All of your experience becomes a hindrance when you start to follow your old steps to the "right solution" every time.' That's total bullshit. If you are getting "real" experience, the "good" experience (which I scarequote mostly because I don't want to go deep into trying to define them but it really ought to be obvious if you think about it), then experience itself tells you when your old experience needs to be augmented.<p>And what disruption are you talking about? I bet in your head you're thinking <i>app</i> disruption; "old fogies" can't come up with the idea for Facebook or something. In <i>programming</i> terms, the disruption is <i>way</i> slower than it appears. When I was 20, I got into Python. Python is <i>still</i> working on penetrating the mainstream. Now I'm getting into Haskell, and if it ever goes mainstream (probably not, but if...) it'll be another 5 years minimum. Programming "disruption" really doesn't move that fast.<p>(For all the sound and fury of Clojure and Scala and Python and Perl and Ruby and so on and so on, huge amounts of the cognitive traffic are just "An ORM for X!" "A jpeg library for X!" "A JSON library for X!" Patterned, shall we say. True disruption happens way less often.)<p>Besides... I'd point out that none of what you cite actually disproves my point. Everything you cite involves situations where they were probably either vetted by other people higher up, <i>or</i> still trading on quality to produce results quickly that are still a net technical value loss, as open source does not intrinsically prevent that. Open source even has some well-known common failure cases on that front, like "preference explosion", using adding preferences to prevent having to make design decisions or telling someone to shove off.<p>You complain as if I'm personally attacking you. I'm not. I'm attacking the stereotype, which definitely exists. And I personally have gotten to the point that someone introduces somebody as a "whiz", I mentally cringe. (The same cringe I do when somebody says "Wow, X fixes like ten bugs a day every day!" BIG RED FLASHING LIGHTS should be going off, not the good kind.) As much as you may not like it... this metric hasn't failed me yet.