My friends who went to medical school are finishing their residencies and starting in private practice; my friends who went to law school are making partner. In most industries, you're just beginning your career when you're in your early 30s
I wonder how much this is to do with the relative newness of programming as a profession. Medicine and law have had a very long time to develop systems to train the young, then identify and reward the knowledgable and talented. Perhaps in a few decades 20-something and 30-something programmers will be regarded in much the same way as their law and medicine practising counterparts.
"How long will people continue believing in the myth of the 15-year-old hacker genius while simultaneously decrying the unreliability of software before the cognitive dissonance finally cracks?" -Dave Herman (http://calculist.blogspot.com/2005/12/12-weeks-with-geeks.ht...)
Also, programmers who have been working for >30 years (who started before the mid-late 70s) didn't have the option of learning to program at home, on a PC. PCs caused the number of new, but not potentially good, programmers entering the job market to spike.
I wonder how much this is to do with the relative newness of programming as a profession. Medicine and law have had a very long time to develop systems to train the young, then identify and reward the knowledgable and talented. Perhaps in a few decades 20-something and 30-something programmers will be regarded in much the same way as their law and medicine practising counterparts.