[pricklepoke]

The older engineers are usually the nicest. They exist peacefully in a privately-defined world of polygon rendering, or TCP stacks, or vector math. They're the REAL thinkers. They won't hassle you.

They're on autopilot half the time anyway; they wrote all their best games/apps/whatever a long time ago and now they just kinda float around soaking up compliments and contributing advice.

They lead quiet, comfortable lives with a history of industry respect and good stock options. But: It's usually easier for a contractor to predict when his or her actual, final day on the job will be. Yay for Q.A.!

[TrainedMonkey]

Till something goes pear shaped in multi threaded database optimizer written in C. They contemplate core dumps and sources for few days and magically come up with an answer. Source: I've seen that happen.