[josephg]

> it's not clear how to balance a fresh perspective vs. an experienced (normalized? tainted?) view.

Having a healthy, balanced view comes from enough experiences. Ideally from working in a bunch of places and seeing enough things go sideways, and correctly understanding and identifying the causal chain that led to failures.

Funnily enough its sort of like training an AI - you essentially need a lot of correctly labelled data to learn. Junior engineers don't have enough data points, and unfortunately some "senior engineers" I've worked with took (in my opinion) the wrong lessons from their experiences. (Eg the CTO who thinks version control is too complex.)

The interesting cases are when smart, experienced people disagree on what the best solution is. Should you keep your team small and smart or have a varied team with more mentorship and process? Is code review worth it in every case? What is the right amount of tests for your software? How often do we want to push to production?

When I was teaching programming my students would sometimes ask juicy questions. My favorites were the questions I could answer with "I'll tell you my opinion, but I've worked with people I look up to who think I'm wrong about this..."