[Grustaf]

1. There are diminishing returns to experience within software development, as you get more experience there are fewer and fewer companies that have any use for those extra years of experience.

2. The perceived value of that extra experience is even lower. How many recruiters or even engineering managers can honestly claim to be able to leverage the last 5 years of experience from someone with 20+ years?

3. In most industries your salary stagnates much earlier than that unless you transition to a management role, and I think it is safe to say that developers are much less keen on taking that step than say bankers.

[nilkn]

I would amend this to say that time spent in a career represents a commodity that one can invest in oneself, and different folks invest that commodity in different ways and to different extents.

Some folks coast and fall into the category of "1 year of experience, 10 times in a row." Someone else gets more out of 2 years of working than the coasters get out of 10. In the worst case, you have a coaster who thinks they're actually in the second category.

A simple number for years of experience is very hard to interpret as a result. Take someone in the second category and give them 10 years of experience and you get someone amazing at their craft. But you have to be able to reliably discern this in the interviewing process.

[plutonorm]

And even if they are, transition into management is much harder. In my experience in the UK, in London at small to medium companies, I've never seen a promotion to management and only once seen promotion to senior developer. Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.

[switch007]

> Developers are not seen as management material - and breaking out of the that perception is incredibly difficult.

The pointy haired bosses all think we have severe autism and can't deal with people.