Team Building Quote by Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Talent doesn’t politely wait its turn, and Brooks is warning managers to stop pretending it does. “Systematically identify top designers as early as possible” reads like process talk, but the subtext is a quiet revolt against credential worship. In engineering culture, “experience” is the safe metric: legible on a resume, easy to defend in meetings, convenient for hierarchies that need to look merit-based. Brooks is arguing that this safety is expensive.

The second sentence is the knife: “The best are often not the most experienced.” Not “sometimes.” Often. He’s naming an uncomfortable pattern in design-heavy work (software especially): the people with the clearest architectural instincts can be young, impatient, and hard to slot into a ladder built around years served. Experience can calcify into reflex, into allegiance to familiar tools, into an allergy to conceptual leaps. Good designers, by contrast, tend to see systems as shapes and tradeoffs, not as accumulated war stories.

“Systematically” matters. Brooks isn’t romanticizing lone geniuses or gut-feel hiring. He’s pushing for institutions that can spot design judgment early and then protect it from being drowned by committee consensus. In the context of Brooks’s broader legacy in software engineering, this is also a critique of the myth that scale and seniority automatically produce better outcomes. If you wait until someone is “senior enough” to lead design, you’ve already squandered your best leverage: getting the right mind on the hardest decisions before the wrong ones fossilize.