My comment wasn't self-referential, I'm not complaining, I do exercise. Have you noticed the use of terms of possibility and not certainty in my prior comment? I'm just stating the general facts on long-term career of a software engineer.

Dont listen to those kids. Ive seen a lot of youngsters coming as Software Engineers. They have no skill, no motivation to learn, they just spend a lot of time in coffe talks and get nice paycheck. If they fail, they are being pet and said: no worry, we will find you easier task to do. And then they come to some "oldfart" engineer and ask him to do the thing.

I have first hand story where my colegue had a cow-worker like this and wanted to get rid of him.. Took whole year to do so, but NO.. he wasnt fired.. he was promoted!!! But my colegue said: At least, we get rid of him :)

I think you're shifting the focus to an entirely different matter, and honestly, I'm not sure I can wholeheartedly agree with you. I've seen many young, motivated beginners who performed exceptionally well, even teaching veterans with their fresh perspectives.

Experience in our field is a double-edged sword - at times it can feel like a burden that pushes intuition away from the objectives. After all - we're all junior SEs - whenever we need to start a new project - we have to learn or at least refresh our knowledge. Just because a kid fresh from college doesn't know how to use Makefiles, can't write C without memory leaks, or hasn't used Vim keybindings and panics when seeing Emacs, doesn't mean they lack programming talent.

I agree partially. I worked w/ youngsters that had talent and motivation to learn. Unfortunately, I saw it less and less in places where I worked.. Hence my comment here..

Industry shifted into weird direction here.. Youngsters are pet while old engineers that had knowledge and experience where squeezed more and more... It really makes you demotivated..