This is a very good point imo, I've met engineers with 15 yoe I consider worse than some engineers with 2 precisely for this reason. Related to this is that th

This is a very good point imo, I've met engineers with 15 yoe I consider worse than some engineers with 2 precisely for this reason. Related to this is that there are social problems about not getting good enough fast enough. I had a chat at one point with a developer who just hit 40 was struggling to find work and asked for some feedback. I asked him to explain Depth First Search to me and he couldn't do it, he was quite confident he could _implement_ it, but not explain it. Now, if he were 20 with no yoe, I might chalk that up to inexperience and bank on being able teach him, but at 15 yoe you don't know DFS well enough to explain it the odds of you getting it now are slim. The inability to answer problems of _at least_ this complexity leads to a social problem in the workplace: the young guys are going to go to this older, experienced employee and ask them to explain something along the same lines of complexity as DFS. In my experience, one of three things will happen: 1. They explain it poorly, the younger employees will believe them, and now I have two employees with a shared misunderstanding 2. They explain it poorly, the younger employees will not believe him, and now they won't respect them 3. They say they don't know how to solve the problem, the younger employees won't respect them All of these results slowly lead to a dysfunctional team.