I am interviewing candidates a lot (I would say on average 1-2 per week for the past 20 years). At least in case of software development jobs I think there is

I am interviewing candidates a lot (I would say on average 1-2 per week for the past 20 years). At least in case of software development jobs I think there is couple additional factors: - people who are absolutely unable to do it but have strong desire to get well paying job regardless. I have actually seen this work. Ie. a person that can't program at all be called a principal developer and for years successfully hide the fact she can't program anything more complex than a simple loop. - young people who tend to completely mistake what the job is about. They think software development is about coding when it actually is about building stuff and coding is just one tool to do it. - people overpromoted very quickly (most likely to keep them and or avoid salary raise), having very unrealistic expectations. A lot of candidates I am getting are calling themselves senior developers even though they have 1-3 years of experience and are still learning to program. And have no real world experience beside 1-2 projects they worked for. They could potentially become better developers in future. But they are impatient with their careers and are skipping the part where they should be getting experience. - people who cod do it but don't care. They don't care about development but are intelligent enough and want good salary. The issue is, people do not learn things well if they don't care about them. Halfhearted effort at learning results in mediocre results. In my lifetime I think I saw only a single good developer who did not care about development but he was such a professional trooper that he forced himself to do it well by sheer power of his will. As to working for the same company for 30+ years, I got to know some people who worked 20+. They usually don't stay in development job and are getting promoted thus removing themselves from the developer candidate pool. I also don't think it is healthy for your experience nowadays to stay in one place for so long. I think having varied development experience, seeing different kinds of projects with different kinds of abnormalities, is important to be able to understand what is going on in your project on a larger scale. And this is important if you want to advance to something like tech lead or an architect.