When JavaSoft spun out of Sun to build Java, they hired recent graduates, many out of CMU: Mark Reinhold, Josh Bloch, Anand Paliswamy (?), David Connelly, et al. The exception was the Swing team, who had done GUI frameworks before (though never in just one year).
Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other.
Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh.
And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.
Their key virtue (imho): no politics. They hadn't learned to play the game, buy time, pad estimates, defend their technical choices, and so on ad infinitum. Instead they mostly tried to gain the respect of each other.
Granted as the team grew into 2D and the 10K API's of Java 2, some political teams came on board. sigh.
And it wasn't "companies" hiring and developing them. It was 1-2 senior managers with long histories who managed to extract JavaSoft from Sun to get some breathing room.