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I said life experience matters... especially when managing people. It is the same in many areas of life. A good developer at 23, is probably much better at 3

I said life experience matters... especially when managing people. It is the same in many areas of life. A good developer at 23, is probably much better at 30, after some real life experience in shipping many products. A crappy developer at 23, may become better at 30, or maybe still be crappy at 30.... I'd take a good 23 yo, over a crappy 30yo, but i'd take a good 30 yo over a good 23. The good 30 will have the maturity that comes from shipping long multiple years projects, and have both successes and failures in their belt and learned from them. So, I think experience (up to 10-15 years) makes an already good developer better....

0xy 6y ago
There is no "you can only go up" trajectory to development experience. A 30 year old might be half the developer they were at 23, due to burnout/disillusionment/less time. Developers can flounder after previously being excellent. I've seen it. Something I've also seen a lot is developers getting promoted to levels they cannot handle, and imploding as a result (it's hard to recover from this). Some people could not lead a project with 30 years of experience. Some people could lead a project with 0 years of experience. Age is basically irrelevant.