experienced vs. being engaged

A few weeks back I was talking to my manager about why some people are "self managers" and some people need someone to tell them what to do next (i.e. being "driven"). I proposed that people with more years of work experience are self-managers since they are "experienced". If you have been around in the industry for sometime, you might have an idea of the weight placed on your "work experience". However, my manager had a different point of view about this. The following is a largely abridged version of the 45 minutes discussion we had about the matter of being "engaged".

Years of experience do not matter when it comes to your proficiency with a tool or a language or the amount of insight you have into a problem. What matters is how "engaged" you are with it. For example, take the example of a fresher deeply interested in the topic of starting and keeping a website running. This means that he should know about writing user facing webpages as well as designing database schema that will give back results in milliseconds as well as know about design patterns to help him write better code. He will also research on how to do load balancing, take backups, kickstarting a system (to replace failed hardware), which kernel parameters to tune to increase tcp throughput, which algorithm to use to search your database faster etc.

Someone who is not "engaged" will be happy putting up webpage by copy/pasting snippets of code. Even if he has on the job for 5 years, it will not make him wiser about how he can increase the throughput of his site or how to save his server from being pwn3d.

Hence, saying that someone with less (or null) years of experience cannot be a self manager does not make sense. It all boils down to how interested he is in what he is doing.

As a sidenote, this insight too came from the same discussion

What happens when you read a book ? If the book is well written, what you are effectively doing is "absorbing" the experience of the author. A well written book, in most of the cases, tell you about pitfalls and alternative ways of approaching a problem (the design patterns book or programming pearls are good examples of this case).