I hate to sound like an old fogie here (I am almost 40) but one thing that occurs to me is that as we age our thinking changes and all the things you mention of

I hate to sound like an old fogie here (I am almost 40) but one thing that occurs to me is that as we age our thinking changes and all the things you mention often develop over time. When you are 20 you are pretty much at the height of your mathematical abilities. This is fine for certain kinds of programming, but it is not really ideal for others. It ensures that algorithms primary and the domains in a real sense become secondary. As you get older, these tend to flip. You understand the domains better and may not be quite as good at generating optimal algorithms, but the tradeoff is generally positive. Additionally I think there is a tradeoff that happens between dreaming of building great things and developing a craftsmenship approach to the small things. Engineer the small pieces well, and the big pieces will take care of themselves. In most areas, I think one is better with a very mixed-age and mixed-experience team. Older, more experienced programmers bring something very special to the table, but the same is true for younger programmers as well. This being said, I have a few very minor disagreements with you ;-). These may be split hairs though. First, while I rewrite more in some ways, I actually find on the whole I rewrite less because I am not afraid to procrastinate while trying to understand the domain. People wonder why my code seems to come out fully formed and it is because I am not afraid to spend my time thinking about the problem instead of writing a rough draft. What has changed is the sort of rewrites I do. I will typically re-engineer a small piece to remove cruft based on lessons learned from the last two years, rather than rewriting a big piece to meet a new requirement (because things tend to be designed more extensably now). So I am less afraid to rewrite and more willing to do so, but at the same time, I tend to rewrite less. Finally there is the question of optimal way to program. I am of the opinion (probably in part because of how much work I do with Perl) that there is no singular optimal way. Optimal has to be globally defined and one of the jobs of the engineer is to ensure that the framework is optimal so that the team can program optimally. If the team is not part of the definition of what is optimal, then I do agree it is a mess. But I don't think we are dealing with a single dimension here. Understanding the problems the team is struggling with is a good way to ensure that framework can be built in a way that drives that average capability up.