Do not be too afraid of these 'young geniuses'. There is much more problems to solve that smart people available. And when we got smarter, we'll just attempt to solve more complicated problems. It was first described in article "Humble Programmer" by famous Dijkstra (author of "GOTO statement is considered harmfull", an mid 70'ies).

Germans have excellent word for it, "sitzfleisch". It means "meat used to sitting" - meaning to sit on your butt while solving problems. You need to use both sides of your spinal cord to solve problems... : )

I had a friend in my college with IQ 160. Smart genius, but no 'sitzfleisch', hardly able to be interested in complicated issue long enough to finish it. Hopefully, by now he needs to pay rent and sit around to finish solution.

Compare with athletics, they have sprinters, and they have long distance runners. Sprinters do nor run marathon - they will never win.

I have no problem to learn new cute trick to provide smart solution for a script, it does not matter if author is 15 or 75 years old. But there is also real-life experience with designing systems, making them user-friendly, scalable and flexible, etc. This kind of skills you are not likely learn from 'young geniuses'. So we older, less genius programmers can survive, too. Maybe we can hire smart young guys, give them a chance to learn how to implement big projects.

I know they may not appreciate project-management knowledge, may prefer to run full speed agains the wall (and hit it full speed), but it is fine. They will learn from this experience, too...: )

Again, I have nothing against if somebody is young and smart. Even in case if s/he does not appreciate other skills I have. As long as s/he is not in charge of the project... : )

Sometimes if frustrating to be the 'clairvoyant' one. I am new in perl (3 months), but have plenty experience in database design in other languages. I was struggling to persuade my colleagues (with more experience in perl, but less in design of big projects) to implement some solutions, where I was clear about dangers of their proposals, but danger was too ahead for them to think about. So their perception was, I am solving non-issues, while I was sure that ounce of prevention now is going to solve us tons of head-pain medication later.

Just my $.02. Thank you for nice meditation...

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pmas

To make errors is human. But to make million errors per second, you need a computer.