Skill vs time Memes

Years of experience doesn't automatically translate to skill, and that's the uncomfortable truth nobody wants to hear at meetups. You can write spaghetti code for 20 years and still be terrible at it—time served doesn't equal mastery. Some people start coding at 8 and plateau by 18, while others pick it up at 30 and become wizards within months. It's like saying you're good at cooking because you've been burning toast since childhood. The real flex isn't how long you've been doing it, it's whether you actually learned anything during those years or just copy-pasted from Stack Overflow with increasing confidence.