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by nostrademons 3795 days ago
I've noticed this, but usually consider it a feature, not a bug. The better companies are at least aware that this is going on, and can use it to their advantage when it suits them or counteract it when it doesn't.

The thing is - if you zoom out, "experience" is nothing more than overspecialization in the particular environment you found yourself. That applies at the industry, society, evolutionary, and planetary levels as well. Organisms adapt to the particular circumstances that they live in. Usually these adaptations are beneficial, because otherwise they get pruned out and people adopt different ways of doing things. But sometimes the environment changes in a way that makes all that accumulated knowledge irrelevant, and you end up like the dinosaurs. Extinct.

I've found that most of the time, people's knowledge is the product of hard-won experience, and if you tear it down, you will encounter the same problems that led to them coming to those conclusions in the first place. But occasionally, something changes in the environment, and you need to tear things down to adapt. If you want to build off existing knowledge, become an employee, and join a company that's busy figuring out all the corollaries of the premise that founded it. If you want to challenge existing premises, become a founder, and look for areas where the environment has changed in a way that invalidates existing knowledge.

If you try to build something totally new and different by learning all the existing ways people have built stuff, you will probably fail (believe me, I've tried several times). Similarly, if you join an organization hoping to tear down all the wisdom they've accumulated and replace it with an outsider's perspective, you will probably meet significant resistance. Sometimes organisms have to die to learn.