Honestly, the value of a veteran developer can rarely be quantified. "Veteran" can mean a variety of things and all of the prior comments suggest this - a developer with 2 years of experience might be as good as a developer with 8 years of experience. This means that years of experience is a very rough indicator of developing talent.
I would label a "veteran" developer as a developer who has been placed in at least 3 different work environments and has performed a variety of different tasks with relation to the development platform in question (in this case, Coldfusion). Someone who has been working on the same intranet application for company x for the last 8 years probably won't know squat about ecommerce. Someone who has been at a web development shop for the last 8 years will probably have a broad range of application experience, but may not know squat about internal users (the folks you can trust with about 30% of everything who may or may not know enough to be dangerous). Now with my definition of "veteran", your new developer won't catch up to the veteran until they have been placed in a few different job roles. Now a new developer may learn how to program absolutely superb code in their first year (highly unlikely), but without a broad range of experience this first year developer will still make mistakes that a veteran developer wouldn't (i.e. hackable application holes, poor data integrity, etc). So in short: years of experience doesn't indicate expertise, and while a new programmer may be able to be as productive as a seasoned veteran in a very short period of time, they are not going to have as strong of a background when it comes to resolving errors and maintaining application integrity. Jake Pilgrim ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~| ColdFusion MX7 by Adobe® Dyncamically transform webcontent into Adobe PDF with new ColdFusion MX7. Free Trial. http://www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion?sdid=RVJV Archive: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/message.cfm/messageid:278339 Subscription: http://www.houseoffusion.com/groups/CF-Talk/subscribe.cfm Unsubscribe: http://www.houseoffusion.com/cf_lists/unsubscribe.cfm?user=11502.10531.4
