I was moderately precocious in my programming and in my career, though probably not terribly so by the standards of this crowd. I got started in C when I was 9

I was moderately precocious in my programming and in my career, though probably not terribly so by the standards of this crowd. I got started in C when I was 9 or 10, and ran Linux on the desktop from 6th grade onward, hacked on device drivers and the like in my middle and high school years, that kind of stuff. I had a relatively "meteoric" early career before going out on my own, going through 6 jobs between age 18 and 22, in some cases doubling my income as I went. I was the chief sysadmin of a small local ISP at 19 (which says more about the ISP), and I was holding fairly serious senior titles at more serious companies in the big city by age 21 or so, making more than my dad at the time, who was a professor. (The consequences of being this young and stupid with this much money are a grim topic for another day.) Anyway, the main age-related shift I've experienced is that the socio-professional aura of my skills and experience went from "holy crap, he's 20 year-old wunderkind" to just kind of table stakes. Nobody's really shocked that mid-30s me is pretty good at what I do and have a lot of experience doing it, and it hasn't been a shock in quite a while. Sure, I'm a lot more credible now as a self-employed consultant than I was at, say, 23, but younger me was a bit of a primadonna and had a big head because I front-loaded so much of the career development and climbing the ladder, at least as engineering per se goes. In these settings, lots of older people resent you (for reasons I find very justifiable in hindsight), but plenty of people pat you on the head along the way, too. I'm not praise-dependent in any extraordinary way, I'd like to think, but anyone can be habituated to something pleasant and can it be a bit of a jolt to feel the tide going out. In addition to undergoing the normal humbling that comes with getting older and realising you're not as brilliant as everyone around you leads you to believe, people also stop telling you you're brilliant to begin with. :-)