First off, it's ridiculous to me that our industry calls five years of experience "senior." In what other industry is a twenty-something with a handful of years

First off, it's ridiculous to me that our industry calls five years of experience "senior." In what other industry is a twenty-something with a handful of years of experience, barely out of college, a senior? I've been at this for only a decade and I bristle at being called senior. In my opinion it's pure ego-stroking. Secondly, old programmers become managers and consultants. Programming is a young man's game, seemingly by design. We invented a hiring process that's roughly equivalent to fraternity hazing, that only younger folks are willy to out up with. We weed out the olds by only seeking out coders who are "passionate" (have no other real world responsibilities) and that are more easily cowed by "Agile" and "Scrum" to become line workers in a feature factory. But the older they get, the less willing they are to out up with the bullshit. I, for one, realized that I wanted to find solutions to tough problems instead of bang out features that no one but the project manager asked for. And as a programmer, you have surprisingly little say over how problems get solved, unless you go into consulting. That's probably where you and I will end up. I believe, because our industry skews so young and inexperienced, that is why continually get caught in hype cycles. Some kid comes along and "invents" some new technology that's actually been around forever, they're just too young to remember. If there were more adults in the room where happens, maybe the kids would stop getting excited over recycled tech. But now I'm veering into oldman-yells-at-cloud.jpg territory, so I should probably stop here.