> In the meantime, though, every single older developer I've met has been extremely knowledgeable and frankly much better at the craft than myself.
While this is true for you, there is a lot of selection bias and survivor bias involved in this.
For These older developers you need to also consider their comrades they were working with 20 years ago. For every older dev you work with today, there are 10 of their former buddies that decided long ago they didn’t need to advance beyond VB 6, or IVM mainframe assembler or RPG/3.
Or they hit the stock lottery jackpot and have retired, or moved into management, or marketing, or started a sandwich shop.
But I do think there's a bit of generational shift that the stereotype of outdated engineers haven't caught up with. When I started out in the mid-90s, anyone more than a little older than me didn't have a CS degree and had come up in a world without source control, continuous integration, automated testing, iterative development processes, open source libraries, etc, etc. So in some ways they were from a different planet than the next generation. Although the tech du jour still changes quickly, programmers in their 40s these days still have a comparatively small gap when it comes to education and development process.
While this is true for you, there is a lot of selection bias and survivor bias involved in this.
For These older developers you need to also consider their comrades they were working with 20 years ago. For every older dev you work with today, there are 10 of their former buddies that decided long ago they didn’t need to advance beyond VB 6, or IVM mainframe assembler or RPG/3.