We're obviously better developers than we were 8 years ago since we've had a lot of practice in that time. However, my team has hired many people in that time, and we also regularly hire co-op students. We see that new employees are able to write better code in Clojure as well regardless of their experience. We've also found that it's easier to train beginners to be effective with Clojure than it was with Java. The language is smaller, more consistent, and encourages good patterns out of the box.