I didn't mean that from a visionary perspective as much as a practical one. For instance, stick someone who's programmed in FORTRAN and COBOL all their life and then set them loose on a newer OO language. The mindset is completely different there. I'm not saying it's impossible, but it's certainly a great deal harder than having a blank slate - and the age makes this a greater problem. The person this article references would be 60+ by now. Entire pillars of programming have shifted since the 60's and now.. that's a lot of damn time in the tech world.
>the way to avoid that problem is by not hiring those people in the first place.
Some things you can't find out until you've actually got someone working with you day by day. You can minimize this somewhat with a decent interview process, but i'd say "culture fit" is one of those concepts that you can't really twig in an interview or two.