Nice, as usual. I'd add that it's not just especially beneficial for new hires. Every shop I've worked, the difference in skills between the top cats and the others was nearly exponential. Not just new hires but guys who were supposed to be experts and had been doing it for a decade or more. The Perl hacker at Amazon I learned the most from was a self-taught guy but he just knew the stuff better than all the rest of us. I think he was embarrassed he didn't have a CS degree too; all the while answering Perl and hardware questions from all the rest of us.

Code review is also a great way to set aside the opinions for the practice. It's easy to say XYZ is how we should do it because someone read a whitepaper but when someone else whips up some ABC instead and shows you how it fits in your app/code-base perfectly it's hard to keep saying, "but, but Sun says XYZ will save us from werewolves... "