40 is old for a software developer. Someone who is 40 today entered college just as web browsers were being invented. You could not just connect the dots on library calls to put together an application then. Now you can.

I have a strong sense of wanting to know how things work that comes from having built a lot of software in the 80's and 90's, when you had to know the internals to make progress. That is downright counterproductive in web development now. By the time you learn enough to understand how a library works, the developer who just learned enough to use it already shipped their code. That's the sort of disconnect between age ranges at work now.

I often feel like everyone on Slashdot is a mix of two people

- Old 50+ year olds used to the good 'ol days when you would write your own stack from scratch whenever writing an application

- 20 year olds fresh out of (or still in) college who yell "squirrel!" at everything new and shiny

For my last mortgage I took pictures of documents with my phone and sent them via email. Not one problem....living in the house now.

...And they all have stories of the "dumbass" PhD, that often turns out to be unfair. Like, maybe that this guy with a PhD couldn't find his car keys one time, and he was holding them in his hand the whole time. One little mistake like that is good enough for them to crap all over everything he's ever done, his alma mater, and the entire college education system... ...position Henry Ford was in when Hitler sent him a medal for all the Jew bashing he did.

...Meanwhile people like Bill Gates and Larry Ellison steadily built up immense fortunes by making absolutely sure that everything their corporations did was directly geared to support continuous long-term profit growth. They may have done some good things along the way, but that was purely coincidental.