Ime past a certain point years of experience doesn't seem to improve one's programming ability. Even in large organizations promotions tend to slow after reaching senior engineer as the job becomes more about people management than actually improving as an engineer. Yes you can continue to gain experience in new tech but the fundamentals of thinking through software solutions doesn't really change.
> Ime past a certain point years of experience doesn't seem to improve one's programming ability. [..] Yes you can continue to gain experience in new tech but the fundamentals of thinking through software solutions doesn't really change.
In my own 20 years of programming experience I've kept improving significantly every year. There are so many different areas to cover (hardware internals, compilers, languages, tooling, databases, networking, graphics, user interaction, i18n, cryptography, compression, etc) and in each area there are so many different competing ideas. Each of them, when deeply understood, will provide insights in other areas. I don't see my learning hitting significantly diminishing returns before death by old age.
I'm curious, at what year of your programming history did you find yourself not progressing in fundamental software thinking and how long has the plateau lasted?
