I was thinking along similar lines the other day. I was thinking about whether I've actually improved as a software developer over my career. It occurred to me

I was thinking along similar lines the other day. I was thinking about whether I've actually improved as a software developer over my career. It occurred to me that most of the languages and frameworks I use are either less than a few years old, or have been changed or reinvented in substantial ways. As such, not much of the declarative knowledge from my early career is of much use. But have my skills improved? I came to conclusion that my ability to code on the micro scale, e.g. at the level of an individual method or algorithm, probably stopped improving after 2-3 years of professional experience. I think you could take the 24-year-old me, ask him to work on a narrow problem, and he'd do about as well as I would now. But where the 24-year-old me struggled a lot was at the macro scale. He didn't know how to compose those individual pieces into a cohesive hole, and instead fell back on a handful of patterns like singletons. I remember horrible days trying to unravel my own code and figure out how component X was going to communicate with component Y, and the result was often a mess. I think this macro-scale ability really does improve continuously over time, as you are exposed to more and better patterns for integrating components and managing dependencies.