Software engineering and hazing

Maybe the reason engineering faculties used to have such painful initiation rituals was that they (unconsciously I'm sure) wanted to drum into you that there was a culture here, you had to adhere to the body of knowledge that existed, that was developed, and that you could not "come in arrogant". This is different from computer science, where everyone is de facto arrogant and knows everything. And when you get old and wizened in the IT world, you try to maintain your influence by going into management, and the continual flow of new technologies keeps coming, almost as if to prevent experience with the details from continuing to grow, to maintain the arrogance of the new, a bubble effect really.

Ultimately it is only experience that counts :

 what you say I forget, 

what I say, I remember, 

what I do, I understand.