I have 18 years of programming experience and it's definitely still true for me. [1] Unless I get some brain degenerative disease, I fully expect to keep improving at least until I'm 80 years old.
I've also seen this echoed by even more senior developers, e.g. this tweet by John Carmack: It is scary to look in some old code that hasn’t been touched in years, and see a completely non-thread-safe static global variable used. [2]
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[1] My code quality is improving all the time. However I'm more accustomed to my emotions and fully expect progress, so I'm not exactly embarrassed.
Yes. I've been doing this for 10 years formally now, and absolutely yes. There is always something to learn and always ways to make things better, which combines nicely with the odds of being perfect the first time are low.
Not sure what you mean by "really senior", but I've been professionally programming for the last 8 years and it still happens to me. The embarrassment has lessened and it's less frequent, but it does happen.
Unless you are rewriting the same code over and over you are always trying new things and expanding your knowledge. And that means learning new things, and making mistakes doing so.
I've also seen this echoed by even more senior developers, e.g. this tweet by John Carmack: It is scary to look in some old code that hasn’t been touched in years, and see a completely non-thread-safe static global variable used. [2]
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[1] My code quality is improving all the time. However I'm more accustomed to my emotions and fully expect progress, so I'm not exactly embarrassed.
[2] https://twitter.com/id_aa_carmack/status/339406631613890560