[HWR_14]

> empower new hires to fix things as they go along.

Sometimes things are the way they are for a reason. "This is a regulatory requirement". "This matches the style of six million lines of code and redoing it isn't on our hitlist - in fact match this way going forward." "Yeah, the CEO got drunk and made a bet with another CEO that all new lines of code could avoid 'e' in variable names, so it's a hard rule that we write it n3xt."

I certainly think it's very valuable to get an outsiders impressions and the problems that they see being raised before they get used to stupid ways of doing things. There's a continuum between the new programmer deciding they're going to convert all tabs to spaces and patching a critical security hole they see because of an out of date library.