When I was starting out in the industry, I wasn’t even a programmer yet when a lead developer sat me down and taught me about the pendulum swing. At the time it was closer to six years to two decades. It’s clearly gotten faster in the era of Stack Overflow, but if you’re seeing six months to two years, that’s ridiculous (you’re not, the situation is).

That conversation accelerated the first ten years of my career by making me more effective. I knew people who made it farther with less work than I did, but mostly I knew the reverse. So I in turn have talked about the pendulum swing with more people than any other topic.

In the Expanse, Amos talks about The Churn, which is a related phenomenon.

“When the jungle tears itself down and builds itself into something new. Guys like you and me, we end up dead. Doesn’t really mean anything. Or, if we happen to live through it, well that doesn’t mean anything either.”

If you come through chaos unscathed it doesn't mean you were good. It just means you were lucky. Don’t let it go to your head.

The motivation of people with 3 years of experience is to jump on a bandwagon that mutes the effectiveness of having 15 years’ worth of experience. You’re dragging half of the industry down in order to pull yourself up. That’s defecting, and we all know how that turns out.