> Veterans are invaluable in military service, as they are in any other endeavor. Trade them off against ease-of-management at your own peril.
I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.
Excellent point IMO! For an organization to believe itself the sole proprietor of relevant and useful knowledge within it's domain of operation is pure hubris.
So too is believing it is anything more than a community of individuals, cooperating on the basis of shared- and tacit knowledge as well as skill to perform the different tasks that comprise business operations. Tacit knowledge and skill resides in the specific individuals, and shared knowledge in the specific relations between individuals. Losing an individual is losing part of aggregate tacit knowledge and skill, as well as all the specific relations shared by the individual. The organization as a thing-in-the-world loses part of itself not captured by it's charter and governing contracts (or share value, or business strategy, i could go on). These things are hard to quantify on the best of days, so to assume (or even mandate) that this cost is incurred with net benefit (by, as you say, hiring some industry heavy-hitter who is expected to bring the goods) is fraught with unknowns, and on balance likely hubris.
If your business requires a lot of knowledge specific to your products, think adobe Photoshop, it is hubris to think a new hire experienced even in relevant fields could meaningfully contribute for a long time. If your product uses an industry standard framework or standard, think adobe reader, then yeah, you can probably have someone hit the ground running. But a bigger problem is that when a new hire leaves after 2-3 years and you replace them with a couple people fresh out of school, so that anything they don't come out knowing has to get taught again. And if it takes some large fraction of the 2-3 years to learn your domain specific knowledge you are done for.
I don't think that hiring people to get outside knowledge is that useful in IT.
From what I understand there is no such other occupation that is sharing so much information between people. You have blogs, loads of free and paid materials, you have loads of conferences where you can send your staff to see "how others are doing it".
Other thing that I often see ... a lot of developers really invest in "outside knowledge" and common problem in dev teams is building stuff with new shiny tech or in a new way they saw on the conference.
I never said that experience isn't valuable. The question was whether experience at a particular company was more valuable than experience outside of it. Every time you hire a senior engineer from another company you learn a bit of their secret sauce, making your company stronger. Participating in that knowledge trade is extremely valuable, and without churn you will be left out as most of your engineers will have mostly experience from your company, that is a really bad thing.