Still Got It

The question

You're going to sit across from someone with ten years in and wonder what you've got that they can't get cheaper from someone with five.

Here's my answer. Not the diplomatic one.

You learned it out of a book

When I learned VB6, I learned it from the Black Book. Over a thousand pages. You don't read a book like that cover to cover. You go to the glossary, find the command, read the two pages, and go back to work. You bookmark the important parts until the whole book is bookmarks. Then you stop bookmarking and start remembering.

That process teaches you something nobody talks about: how to decide what goes in your head and what you just need to know where to find. Twenty years of that and you have a lot in your head.

The people coming up now have always had Google, and the newest ones have always had AI. Some of the big companies have started banning junior developers from using it, because they weren't learning to build software. They were learning to write prompts. That works until the tool is wrong and nobody in the room can tell.

You can tell. That's the job.

You've seen this movie

Somebody young and sharp is going to say: microservices are amazing, let's break everything into microservices.

You've lived that. It was called DLL hell. Dozens of tiny pieces, nobody sure which one to call, a reference to add every time you needed the smallest function, dependencies to wire up for everything. It was a nightmare then, and you know exactly which parts of the nightmare are coming back.

Or types. VB6 didn't care what a variable was. You assigned a value, that was the type, and you could change it whenever. Then VB.NET and C# showed up and everything was strongly typed, and that was better. Then React made JavaScript the center of the world and everything was untyped again, and it felt fast until it didn't. Then TypeScript put the types back, because it turns out untyped objects cause errors. Who knew.

Three swings of the same pendulum. The junior sees the theory and jumps on the bandwagon. You've been on that bandwagon. You know where it stops.

What that's worth

The junior can write the code. So can the AI. What neither of them can do is stand in a design meeting and say "we tried that, here's what broke, here's what to do instead," and be right.

That isn't your résumé. It isn't a skill you can list. It's the thing that shows up six months into the job when someone proposes a rewrite and you're the one who knows what it'll cost.

Twenty years in one place didn't make you stale. It made you someone who's seen a full cycle. What went stale was your vocabulary, and that's fixable in a couple of months. The judgment took twenty years, and nobody with five can buy it.

Put that up against anyone.

Next: what the second act actually looks like, and why the best job of my career came after the worst two years of it.