As an older person, I commend you for looking past your comfort zone. Your anecdote certainly doesn't mean that all old people are better developers, but I tel

As an older person, I commend you for looking past your comfort zone. Your anecdote certainly doesn't mean that all old people are better developers, but I tell people that I've already made most of my mistakes 10-15 years ago on other peoples' projects. Gets a bit of a chuckle, but it's reality - we all make mistakes when learning. I just did a prototype demo for someone - took about 6 hours - and it was more fully functional than something they'd had a team of people working on for weeks. It's rare that there's that much of a difference, and to be fair there were weeks of communication and discovery going on that I didn't have to deal with. But the other team was also using an older PHP framework which they were painfully not comfortable with (I later found out mandated for bad reasons). Judging by their code, they wouldn't have been comfortable in any framework, but that's another story. This is far less about how great I am, and more about understanding common problem domains, knowing your tools, knowing when it's OK to cut corners and when not to, and how best to communicate with people. Some of that comes with passion and dedication, but some of it only really comes over time, and the more the better, usually combined with the passion and/or dedication for maximum results.