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Comment by late2part | Hacker News Reader

One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints. Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations. When they come into a new situation, if they match patterns that don't quite fit, they'll apply old solutions to situations that are not appropriate.

Enders Game is a good allegory for this.

It's good to have diversity and meritocratic process for decision making. It's good to have different perspectives, but recognize that sometimes bad experience is worse than little experience.

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Bullshit.

You are the one with a "platonic causation", namely, older = rigid thinking.

Enders Game is a child's book, written to appeal to children. Note we don't actually have 9 year olds making decisions in reality.

> One of the issues that is unpopular to discuss in inertia in constraints.

Prove it with some research. The current research shows that people really don't make their best contributions to their field before 35-45.

And, to be fair, I see more young people who attempt to hit the screw with a hammer because a hammer is the only tool they have.

But what if it's an awesome shiny new hammer based on the latest impulse-delivery fads? Plus, screwdrivers are boring.

>> The current research shows that people really don't make their best contributions to their field before 35-45.

Look at someone like John Carmack - before he was 35 he had done Command Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, Quake 1-3. Guys like Steve Wozniak were basically out of the business by the time they hit 35. Linus released Linux when he was 22, and started git when he was 35. I doubt guys like Marc Andreesen have written much code since they hit 35 as well.

And Federico Faggin who headed the development team for the 4004 was 30 at the time. William Kahan who was instrumental in the Intel 8087 was about 45. I can go on.

So, basically what you're saying is that young people can churn out software where you can undo your huge screwup, but if you have to get it right the first time like hardware, then you need some experience.

A competent person would understand why the solution did or didn't work the previous times, and thus why it would or wouldn't this time.

What you're saying is that some people don't learn from their experiences. You should focus on finding out if they have. That's worth way more than hoping that this young kid will.

Smart and wisdom of experience together are as kids say... gangster. It's only when a person gives up either learning or trying and accept status quo that their ability to make a big impact can be questioned, and that can happen at any age or sometimes never with a lucky few.

>Experienced people have learned a set of platonic causations that they apply to pattern matched situations.

Good developers do use pattern matching. But good developers just use it as a way to come up with ideas, and they use their experience to judge the ideas.

There's no such thing as "bad experience", just poor reasoning skills. And mostly people will improve their reasoning skills over time. Unfortunately, not always.

Experienced developers have more patterns to apply, and they have more sophisticated patterns that can be applied using differential diagnostics. An inexperienced developer might not have any pattern to apply, or may naively apply the wrong one. Sometimes that leads to re-inventing the wheel, sometimes that leads to solving the wrong problems. Errors of the latter sort are favorites for senior developers to come in and clean up.

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