[jeroen94704]

"My hunches have gotten better" is perhaps the best description of the value of experience.

I am 38 myself, and sometimes, when I am surrounded by a new batch of fresh 20-somethings, I feel a little like the author of the original article. They need only a couple of hours to understand a new framework or tool to an extend that I feel would take me days or weeks. And they think nothing of burning the midnight oil for whatever reason, while I really have to get home in time to pick up the kids from daycare.

But then they suddenly make a design decision I just know is never going to work out. Not because I'm smarter (it's probably the other way around), but because I saw a similar mistake being made 10 years ago. Or maybe it's not even that explicit, and a certain solution just "feels" wrong even before I can clearly articulate why.

[agentultra]

That always amazed me when I worked with younger peers. They could pick up the new JS framework/build tool/library-du-jour and whip together an amazing, reactive, fluid GUI in an afternoon. I'd try to cobble together a simple, "Hello world!" with the same technologies and throw my hands up after a few days proclaiming it to be the worst invention since the dust-jacket.

But I taught them about unit testing, data structures, and algorithms. In return for making their programs easier to maintain and faster they answered my dumb questions about crazy JS frameworks. Eventually I did get, "Hello world!" to appear in my browser screen.

I often wonder why it's so complicated but they assure me it's for good reasons.