I agree wholeheartedly. Knowledge, or even intelligence, shouldn't be the most highly valued skill in a team lead.
But there are many people extremely confident in their confirmation bias that seem to be unwilling to consider anything that might challenge their ideas. Our industry has a problem with celebrating the intelligent arsehole. Not only is humility not incentivized, it seems to be actively counterproductive.
I wonder how we can foster the kind of culture that values experience, encourages innovation, and is also able to get things done without chasing geese?
I think you're misinterpreting here. GP didn't make any generalizations about people in their 40's. They were providing additional context about a specific individual. Moreover, the context they were trying to convey was more about the delta in years of experience than a particular age bracket.
Also, thanks for the casual sarcasm, casual assumption of ill-will, casual tone policing of others according to your personal whims, casual accuse-first-rather-than-clarify and embarass-in-public-rather-than-confront-in-private approach. Really brightens the mood in here!
I have been in the situation where you can see even fresh to the workforce that everyone is doing something inefficiently. So you come up with an idea.
In my case it was more prosaic than compilers: they were assigning “pages” to devs to rewrite in .net, but clearly the pages had similarities and it made no sense for different people to be building the same thing in parallel their own way. I was simply suggesting to do some design worm upfront!
But it is hard to be listened to when either young or new to a company. Glad they have you a chance. Lesson for companies: give anyone passionate a chance to experiment!
Did you hand write a parser or does a library already exist ?
You'd think this is something more common with juniors than seniors, but in my experience it's been the opposite. Probably something about being distanced from the fundamentals made them forget how it's possible to build anything from scratch.
10 set i=1
20 i=i+1
20 print i, ". I will not chew gum in class"
30 if i<100 goto 20
40 exit
Not a compiler, but how old am I?
In my first job, back in the late 90s, I was working for a company that, having taken their biggest customer yet, had to split a very large C monolith into chunks that could run on separate servers. The architecture team of the company found all the places where the system should be cut, but that let them with hundreds of functions that had to be replaced with asynchronous calls relying on a queuing system. I was hired into the team that had to stub those hundreds of functions, type up serialization and deserialization for all the hundreds of data structures involved, and gluing it all together. So they had budgeted for 6 months of typing from a team of relatively new developers.
As you might expect, that's not how anyone wants their career to go, but I had taken the compiler class. So I knew I could parse all the header files for the functions we needed to replace, parse the data structures along with it, and just generate all the boilerplate away. My dev lead thought there's no way we could do this, but his manager decided that, at works, giving me two weeks to try it would be a great opportunity to teach the new hire the limit of his knowledge. But as anyone that has taken the compiler course knows, parsing boring C structs and header files isn't magic. So two weeks later, the project was done, and it was working.
As you might imagine, the dev lead, in his 40s, couldn't handle the results all that well, and left quickly. So I went from being stuck writing boilerplate from month to a quick promotion to team lead in under a quarter, all thanks to the compiler course.