&gt;This is NOT the case with software, it&#x27;s possible to be a software engineer with 10+ years experience and still be terrible.<p>Unfortunately most companies don&#x27;t select for good software developers and neither do most software developers (ask people what their favorite kind of interview test&#x2F;question is and you&#x27;ll rarely actually get a good answer but you will often get a confident one).<p>Most companies don&#x27;t reward being a good software developer either. Management mostly just don&#x27;t know what it is you do and have no idea how good you are. Thus they just default to pretending that you&#x27;re a disposable cog even when that behavior is self-destructive.<p>At best they&#x27;ll make use of some poor proxies (degree class, university, popularity of the OSS project you contributed a one line fix to, their personal &quot;gotcha&quot; question, etc.).<p>Is it any surprise that people don&#x27;t improve? With some exceptions, there really is no point.