[Yhippa]

Extremely important. As a junior developer, it was important for me to have people smarter or more experienced than me to bounce ideas off of and to help me understand concepts. Things like "Why use Git? SVN is perfectly fine!"

I don't know if this is true for everybody but there was a window of time where I got to work with senior developers before I became a tech/people manager. That was the time I worked at several different companies and learned from experienced developers before I got put in that position. You want to absorb as much as you can during that time because opportunities become slimmer down the road.

[dasmoth]

Are you absolutely certain you’re not following fashion here? To pick your example... yeah, there are some advantages of Git over SVN, and in particular some scenarios where the “distributed” side of DVCS becomes important. On the other hand, there’s every chance that SVN really was perfectly fine for your project (after all, in its heyday it was very common, and there are still large projects using it today).