I disagree with this: In my 20 years of Software Engineering, I've seen plenty of super smart, knowledgeable and enthusiastic Junior and mid level engineers making wrong decisions that "in theory " look right because they just haven't seen enough production systems.
Battle scars are quite valuable, particularly when shit hits the fan and you gotta draw from your previous experience to understand what REALLY is happening in very short time.
As a specific example, in a previous startup 8 years ago, we were 3 engineers. Two of us had good field experience and the other guy had outstanding academic/algorithmic skills (he won several algorithm competitions). At some point some crap happened to production systems. When the 3 of us saw the logs, he suggested a couple of root causes that just were not really probable. The other engineer and I could "read between the log lines" and got to the real cause pretty fast.
I disagree with this: In my 20 years of Software Engineering, I've seen plenty of super smart, knowledgeable and enthusiastic Junior and mid level engineers making wrong decisions that "in theory " look right because they just haven't seen enough production systems.
Battle scars are quite valuable, particularly when shit hits the fan and you gotta draw from your previous experience to understand what REALLY is happening in very short time.
As a specific example, in a previous startup 8 years ago, we were 3 engineers. Two of us had good field experience and the other guy had outstanding academic/algorithmic skills (he won several algorithm competitions). At some point some crap happened to production systems. When the 3 of us saw the logs, he suggested a couple of root causes that just were not really probable. The other engineer and I could "read between the log lines" and got to the real cause pretty fast.