[vorg]

> Have the[se rookies] make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting

The reality is the opposite: the smooth-talking aptitudeless "rookies" with a years experience 7 times get themselves onto teams designing "interesting" stuff from scratch, then the programming experts are put on the team to clean up the many bugs for years to come.

[JustSomeNobody]

This happens way more often than it should.

[nostrademons]

That's not really a fair comparison: the "rookies" (somehow, I doubt that always applies) are working in an environment where they often don't know the requirements and the only way to find them out is through trial and error, and the fact that the organization can even afford "programming experts" means they must have been somewhat successful. Put a programming expert in a situation where the boss doesn't know what he wants and the only way to find out is to build it 20 times and he'll produce a pile of crud too.

[joedavison]

Often times, only the smartest people can reverse engineer and maintain vast amounts of poorly written code.

When code is terrible, it is very difficult to reason about. Hence, you need to be very smart to reason about it, and be successful in modifying it.