One thing I've struggled with, that is very personality dependent, is being assertive around younger, sharper programmers. It can be an odd dynamic, where I may

One thing I've struggled with, that is very personality dependent, is being assertive around younger, sharper programmers. It can be an odd dynamic, where I may work with people smarter and faster but less experienced than myself. It can become difficult depending on the dynamics to push for the best choices in architecture, libraries, etc, when it is something they don't want to do, if you are not explicitly their senior. More naturally confident and assertive programmers will not have this issue. This is particularly problematic when pushing for restraint. For example, choosing a more well supported and stable UI library for an internal tool, vs using one with e.g. more components or more customization. Its hard to sell that there's no money in fancy internal tools, and a limited set of UI that works well and requires little or no support and even less cognitive load, and just working with those constraints, can result in a net benefit long term. Especially when someone that is sharp and fast can bang out working solutions very quickly. Then three years on the tool is only growing, and the complexity is high, re-usability is low, each page is its own snowflake, and someone has to maintain it. The cost suddenly becomes that of an FTE, for a tool that's only occasionally used, which is astronomically cost ineffective. I told you so is worse than worthless because it solves nothing and only burns bridges. You just deal with the outcome and know you should have pushed harder, perhaps even put your job on the line. Tough to do for trivial matters. I think people that excel as aging programmers figure out how to deal with this well, whether through being more assertive, more convincing, more officially senior, or perhaps even more selective about the situations they get themselves into. I guess what's not surprising is that you can work in this career so long, continually on "the same stuff", and yet the patterns and opportunities can provide interesting new problems to solve, not always the ones you thought needed solving.