Spoiler alert: This article is from 2005, written by Steve Yegge and typical of his trademark blend of perspicacity and prolixity. At the time, "people with 20

Spoiler alert: This article is from 2005, written by Steve Yegge and typical of his trademark blend of perspicacity and prolixity. At the time, "people with 20 to 30 years of experience" would have started their careers in the mid-70's to mid-80's, and might well have been entrenched in Cobol, Fortran, mainframes, and the like. As of today, when people would have started in the late-80's / early-90's, it seems much more likely that they would have had opportunities at least for modern web development. I myself started in the late 80's, programming IBM/370 mainframe assembler for System One, which was Eastern Airlines' computer reservation system. I have colleagues from my training class who will retire soon, having done nothing but that for their entire careers. I saw -- and rejected -- that possibility for myself, and instead actively sought opportunities to learn new technologies as they came along. I learned Java in 1997, and took a job at iXL, an early Java consultancy in Denver, just in time for the "dot-bomb" of the early 2000's. I started paying attention to Ruby in 2005 and worked primarily as a Rails contractor in 2006 - 2007. I started paying attention to Clojure around 2010 and became the first technical hire at a Clojure-based startup in 2011. I currently work as a Senior SDE at Amazon (opinions my own, obvs), having been here for nearly seven years and having written code in Java, Ruby, Scala, Python, etc. for a number of Amazon-scale systems. "It's not the years, honey; it's the mileage." -- Indiana Jones