The Five Stages of Developer Experience

1. Everything is Awesome.
   Everywhere you look there is something cool going on.
2. There is so much to learn!?!
   The slow realization that behind every cool thing there is a mountain of history, research, and development.
3. So few master all this...
   Somethings you can master, while some are beyond mastery, so you work on bright-lining your limits.
4. Change is a smell, dammit!
   Having studied your own limits, you see co-workers and others over-stepping theirs. Which means that this happens everywhere.
5. Retirement.
   Everything important is offline. You moved to a strong town, and half of your retirement funds are held in gold in a vault downtown. You spend your free time reading engineering failure investigations and writing microcontroller code for the home when absolutely needed. Most times you decide to not write the code.