I'm sorry if I wrote that in such a way that made it sound like I was saying that you shouldn't hire people with experience -- quite the contrary! I think you take much more of a risk hiring people straight from school, because they're trained in all the buzzword technologies, but they have few or no demonstrated real skills yet. The real skills are the ones that always go in the second half of a job's qualifications, after they quote the things they think are important (what software / programming languages you know). You know, things like, "works well to a deadline with minimal supervision, quick learner, good problem solver..."

I think it is foolish to say, "We need [qt|gtk|c++|buzzword|linux] experts" rather than, "We need people who have shown (by their past experience) to be smart, quick learners, and enthusiastic about the product sector.