While it's certainly not the case everywhere, the truth is that a lot of software development needs out there aren't terribly challenging to get to a "good enou

While it's certainly not the case everywhere, the truth is that a lot of software development needs out there aren't terribly challenging to get to a "good enough" state from a business value perspective. This is exacerbated by the hyper-specialization of shallow roles where companies are basically looking for technologists. Once upon a time people used to hire software developers expecting them to figure out how to solve problems across almost all software layers and to take their time doing it. Now many positions are for churning out work with a specific library or framework in a specific language. It doesn't take a long time for there to be diminishing returns in terms of the worth of each extra year of experience when someone's role is to work as a "React developer" or something like that especially if someone else is responsible for making the designs and another person for setting up the backend or if the bulk of the software can effectively be outsourced by leaning on open source tech. Factors like flexibility in work hour expectations and compensation favor younger developers who tend to have fewer responsibilities outside of work but have enough specialized skills to get the grunt work done and are able to put in the hours to make up for their lack of experience. Generally younger developers are not as well suited for making lots of bigger architectural decisions since they don't have the experience to really grasp longterm consequences of different approaches, but in terms of numbers, you need fewer people making those decisions than those doing the grunt work and young people with just a few years of experience often seem to do the grunt work about as well as anyone. This wouldn't be such a big problem for older software developers if there wasn't a pay expectation gap or if they were as likely to be flexible about hours. Rightly or wrongly, however, people expect higher compensation for their experience, even if much of that experience isn't actually producing that much more business value given the sort of work that they are actually stuck doing. The world definitely has a place for the John Carmacks, but it's really not that large a percentage of jobs where they can make the most of the value they have to offer.