Quote Originally Posted by JohnW@Wessex View Post
That's not what i meant. It's that, until you get a bit more experience or are naturally an 'out of the box' thinker, your thinking can be be a little blinkered after being told the 'facts' for several years. I used to do a lot of music in a band years ago and used to write my own material. I had many a graduate music student tell me I was playing the 'wrong' combination of notes because "X is not in the key of Y and music theory say they don't go" or something in that vein.
Oh dear, that makes me a misfit then! Correct on the detail, wrong on the authority.
What we want is a creative person that can implement their ideas based on best practices and existing language features. One of our most successful image processing algorithms came about after throwing out the standard book methods and indulging in a bit of imaginative brainstorming.
You seem to be pigeon-holing people into one mutually exclusive group or another, which I don't believe is valid. Give me a coder that can question the 'correct' solution and look at a problem from another angle any day.
I consider myself to be very creative (and have been thought of as such by colleagues, if I may blow my own trumpet), but I also fall definitely in to the introvert camp.
nuzzle seems to be fighting straw men here. The best programmers I know are the ones that can decompose big problems into little solvable ones. Most of them tend to be more the maverick types than those with a strong respect for authority, and they set themselves apart by being able to think outside the box and see solutions that elude others.

That's more a personality trait than an education vs. non-education thing. Education gives you the tools, but experience gives you the wisdom of how best to use them.

If you were getting work done on your house, would you rather have a kid with a truck load of shiny tools, or a carpenter with 25 years experience and a box of well-worn tools he knew how to use?