Being a new engineer is easy. You have boundless energy, passion, and time. You can only get better. You're a sponge taking in all new information. As you get older, you have less time and patience for the next new thing that comes along, plus all those things you learned years ago aren't current any more. Plus, people hiring you have a bias that you aren't current on the latest things since you are older.
Can you elaborate on this? I am a fairly new developer and haven't found it particularly difficult.
It's easy if you have 4 years of school to soak up knowledge. But if your family can't afford to pay your school fees, you end up working somewhere full-time. So you have to study nights. Except you fall in love and get married to a wonderful woman, but then she wants to spend those nights with you. So then you end up not sleeping and begging her to get a night-job so that you can learn how to install arch linux on a virtual machine. Becoming a software engineer when you have life commitments is tough, and you end up reading programming language books on your iPhone every time you go to take a crap. Believe me, it's hard.