Both theory and experience lead me to believe that people who learned in the small company environment will have a bunch of really, really bad habits that they will never realize are bad habits because they have never worked with anyone who could set them straight. This is the old "big fish in a small pond" problem.

In a number of fields I have found that people who think they are good generally think that because they've never met anyone who is good. And as a result they are really bad. Because no matter how much talent they have, they simply aren't going to figure out on their own enough to be better than people who have exposure to the wider world.

About the "group shop" issue. I'm in a team of under 10 people. (How big the team is depends on how you count it - for instance I mostly do reporting these days, so I'm not part of the core team.) Is that a group shop in your eyes? Yet every member of this group is at least decent by my standards, and my standards are pretty high.

In reply to Re^2: Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly
in thread Where are future senior programmers coming from? by tilly

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