No. It’s rigor. It’s learning instead of dutifully following every fad and “best practices” document.

I worked with a guy at Microsoft who had been at it seven years; he was writing a keystroke processor, which should have been a single function with a switch-case. He wrote a class factory for each keystroke we handled, a new class instance for each keystroke.

I asked him why the hell he did all that unnecessary crap. He frostily answered, as though I was some kind of idiot for asking, “we always create a class factory in this team.” I have no qualms about calling him a moron.

At less than THREE years in I had already been a developer on OS/2 3.0, and I had written two entire products in the SQL Server group, and I didn’t call myself “senior” for twelve more years.