Seth Godin writes in his blog: The paradox is that by the time you get to be senior, the decisions that matter the most are the ones that would be best made made by people who are junior... 

While he has an incredibly good point, I think it's only half the story.  I've been at a number of places where the fresh new management tries to do or redo things that have already failed.  It's why senior developers hate junior developers coming in with their wild ideas and wild theories.  In a lot of cases, many of those things have been tried, and discarded as expensive wastes of time. 

I remember back to my time at Object Design when we shifted from our resilient ObjectStore OODBMS business to this new XML B2B market.  We got clobbered - we let our B2B division cannibalize us to the point where our stodgy OODMBS customers no longer trusted in us - trusted our vision.  For all the hype about social media, it's very similar to what the XML crazy was 10 years ago.   No one knows how this is all going to play out, or even if it's a lasting fad - but it has all the signs it might.  The smart people right now are the ones who are looking two years into the future, with an eye to the past, for those who forget their history (or never learned it) are doomed to repeat it. 

And the idea that Apple doesn't have a social media footprint is absurd - they have a wildly passionate army of people pushing their products and the best social footprint imaginable - they have stores in nearly every big mall in every market that counts.  It's things like that which were responsible for propelling Microsoft to the top of the heap.  

As a rebuttal, the Apple thing is debatable, but the point I truly want to make is that just because you're junior doesn't mean you have fresh eyes - you're flying blind, without the range and history of experience to guide you.  But Seth is correct, in that just because you are Senior, doesn't mean you know it all, or have all the answers.  Sometimes the blinders of history and experience prevent you from seeing the changes happening all around you. 

 

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