What I think you're missing is how easy it is to coast in this field. It certianly sounds like you're a smart capable person with the good fortune to largely work with other smart capable people. That's great; it's not normal. At least coming from the financial sector (which employees huge numbers of people with the title "software developer") there's a pularity of people who stop improving somewhere around year one then coast on office politics and inter-firm job hopping. These are the people I think the new wave of companies/teams are looking to avoid. After 10+ years, your jobs, if you're good, ought to be coming from network references rather than facebook adds anyway.
Experience is necessary but not sufficient for a top quality dev and top quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to make successful software. The cult of experience in other engineering disciplines is the reason those salaries are so low compared to ours (despite the fact that the work, schooling, and certification are orders of magnitude more involved). Let's not bring that to software please.
Experience is necessary but not sufficient for a top quality dev and top quality is neither necessary nor sufficient to make successful software. The cult of experience in other engineering disciplines is the reason those salaries are so low compared to ours (despite the fact that the work, schooling, and certification are orders of magnitude more involved). Let's not bring that to software please.