Ah, the Dunning-Kruger effect at its finest. :-)<p>Please ask yourself this: even if you do know 20-year-olds who have done impressive things, why would you think that such talented and/or hard-working people will not be able to achieve still more impressive things at 30, when they have roughly an order of magnitude more useful experience? What about at 40, when they have had time to see through several long-term projects?<p>Or look at it the other way around: do you really think none of the successful older developers today also contributed to volunteer projects during school, worked summer jobs, or tried a start-up straight out of college?<p>It is true that disruption of routine is sometimes important for the industry to make progress, but it says a lot that you chose the word "dominated". Our industry isn't "dominated" by disruption at all. On the contrary, it is dominated by people who make useful products, using untrendy but tried-and-tested tools and techniques, that get real work done.<p>Every now and then, something truly original or a genuinely creative application of an old idea comes along, and that can become a great success. But for every one of those, there are a lot of ideas that stink and go nowhere. And guess what? Many of those ideas come from the young people who are convinced they're on a winner, because they are too inexperienced to know better, where more experienced developers might have seen similar ideas fail before and know an idea was doomed before wasting any time on it. Conversely, despite your rather odd assertion that broader experience somehow implies being set in one's ways, IME those who have been around for a while are much better at spotting opportunities to fill useful niches or change the rules in a significant way, and are much better at making practical, pragmatic decisions to take advantage of those opportunities.<p>YMMV, but I'd bet a substantial chunk of money that in ten years' time, you'll be on my side of the argument. :-)