> Second, no one has 20 years of relevant experience. Maybe computer science fundamentals have stayed about the same, but it was 1993 20 years ago, and what we do now looks nothing like what those of us who were around then were doing.
I'll assert the opposite: I haven't seen many new ideas on the software front in the last 20 years. All the advancement has been domain-specific. I bet you could take a team of people who were experts in 1993 and hadn't touched a computer since and still develop a world-beating product today, all else being equal. Heck, Common Lisp has pretty much stagnated for what 15+ years now (the ANSI standard is 20 years old, and CLTL is 30), and ITA is still writing world-beating software with it...
I'll assert the opposite: I haven't seen many new ideas on the software front in the last 20 years. All the advancement has been domain-specific. I bet you could take a team of people who were experts in 1993 and hadn't touched a computer since and still develop a world-beating product today, all else being equal. Heck, Common Lisp has pretty much stagnated for what 15+ years now (the ANSI standard is 20 years old, and CLTL is 30), and ITA is still writing world-beating software with it...