What are some things that only someone who has been programming 20 years knows?
I was writing production code over 30 years ago (C, OS, database). It is much worse to be a software developer now. It used to be a very high autonomy job - where you were trusted to figure out your work process and usually given lots of freedom to dynamically define many of your deliverables (within reason). I remember when I first read about Agile - I looked at the practices and thought "I've done most of those." But when our nightly builds broke it was no big deal, we would just fix them when we got around to it (as opposed to managers now assigning blame and calling in people on weekends to "fix" it). And if things weren't going well then we might have daily brief meetings for a couple of weeks. But now there are managers who insist on daily standups irregardless of their actual business necessity. I could go on and on. There is a reason why I'm not a practicing programmer anymore - even though I love to code.