The problem with hiring programmers for learning speed is that even fast learners will take months to years to catch up to experienced people. If you’re doubling the size of your company every year, even without attrition, you end up with most of your code written by people who aren’t that good (yet).
Conversely, if you discount learning speed, then you'll have "experienced" people who, even after years, are barely ahead of the starting line. If you keep them around, your code is going to be written by people who still aren't that good and never will be...
Of course it'd be really nice get get one over on this regime by finding people whose bases alone are strong enough to carry, but if you're in the position where you're trying to make this trade-off you probably can't afford them.
I think this makes the error that experience is proportional to time. Some people are just “experiencing” the same problems and attacking them the same ways for years and years and not really building any additional experience beyond the first time they encountered the situation. But maybe that’s why you put experience in quotes.
