> I think it's pretty obvious. After you've been coding for almost 2 decades across multiple industries, coding becomes predictable and tedious. By that point, you've become an expert in many sub-fields within computer science; you probably even started to forget some of the old technologies/methodologies that you used to be an expert at.

Are you at this stage now, or theory crafting?

I've been coding for 2 decades and I don't find it predictable or tedious.

Life is an event stream of lessons. Things you learn from previous events don't automatically become useless just because there's a new tech trend in town.

For example, when I was writing PHP code in 2000, I still apply the lessons I learned then to code I write today in non-PHP languages. Those lessons I've learned are what makes me a better programmer today than I was 20 years ago.

I venture to suggest that the fact that after 20 years you use the word “coding” to refer to the totality of what a human can create with digital technology and computer code reveals that you sadly have glimpsed but a tiny fraction of the wondrous intellectual vistas that were out there for you.

> After you've been coding for almost 2 decades across multiple industries, coding becomes predictable and tedious.

Move out of your comfort zone and take on some projects outside of your established expertise.

> Unlike many other fields, the returns that you make from investing in yourself as a software developer/engineer don't compound; they start to depreciate as soon as you stop trying to keep up.

This is only true if you invest in frameworks/libraries/languages/etc. If you invest in understanding problems faced within industries and how to solve them with software, that's not something that depreciates.

Just so that doesn't sound like something abstract, take for example an e-commerce marketplace. Knowing that you need to create two objects, one for the order and another as an invoice for each seller within that order, isn't knowledge that will depreciate with time.

On top of that, there is general knowledge of algorithms and a thousand other things that are sufficiently generalized that they can be applied at any time.

Virtually every project that I take on is in a new space and I learn constantly, keeping things interesting. For reference, since we're talking about age, I'm 37.

Really well put and there are about a dozen lessons that could be extrapolated from this comment in terms of management, career planning, and software development practices and industry maturity.

You’re confusing learning software engineering and computer science with learning programming frameworks.

>>After you've been coding for almost 2 decades across multiple industries, coding becomes predictable and tedious.

Well yeah, if you are still “coding” after two decades you will probably find it tedious.

You can move into “engineering” and “architecting” however, which involve entirely different challenges, both in type and scale.