I agree more experienced people usually get stuff done and it's generally been my experience. Of course there are always exceptions. The problem I see is that o

I agree more experienced people usually get stuff done and it's generally been my experience. Of course there are always exceptions. The problem I see is that often it is not the output itself that wins, rather the perception around the output. I've seen many talentless people rise through the ranks of companies or start their own just because they were good at bs'ing, marketing themselves, had a certain personality type, and many other things that had little to do with programming directly. Of course some of these things are important and valuable, but many of them are toxic, especially in a software development context. Indeed, we've all observed countless startups that become industry darlings that don't even ever produce real revenue let alone profits. We can argue about what their output actually is, but often it's smoke and mirrors at best, fraud at worst. This all happens often at the expense of progress or another company that actually does produce value, but fails at playing the game properly (same applies to people). But these startups "succeed" at least temporarily because they create perceptions that one day, just with many more millions and many more articles, they will be great and rule the world. Whether it catches up with them or not is something else. Perception is the way so many things in life work, and particularly important to many companies, the stock market. I think there are just so many examples where the belief that if you work hard and do good work does not hold. I personally value these things, but many people do not. It's a complicated topic I could ramble on about forever, but I think we've all been in these situations and had things happen to use like receiving praise for arguably our worst work.