Sorry. I'm coming up on 15 years, and I am not 3x more productive than the better young developers I've hired. I just don't think this sentiment is valid.

better young developers I've hired that's not what I said. Are You ~3x as productive Now than when You started? It's not a question of typing speed or syntax, it's a question of what you can get done in a 1 month. And how much damage you will do in that same month.

One of the better examples of this is helping to debug someones program. Now I frequently hear, I was trying to do X, it almost works, but it's also doing Y, and I will say ok you made a mistake in this area. It's not just understanding code, but also understanding the typical mistakes we make. Tracing down an off by 1 error is something everyone learns, but they don't teach it in school.

I might be 3x better. I am not 3x more productive. I do much more than just code now, though.

Young developers can be, and often are, highly productive but software development is more nuanced than just raw lines of code. Sensible design is both very difficult and very important and I don't think anybody gets very good at it with less than 10 years of experience.

The first 100K lines or so are easy and somebody with talent who is fresh out of school is going to get to the finish line at least as fast as a 10 year veteran. The real test is the next 100K lines of code which the experienced designer is going to breeze through while the novice is about to learn an important lesson: Writing large programs is much harder than writing small ones.

So write smaller programs. Use a higher level language.

You're missing the point, I think. Higher-level languages just reduce the number of lines before you start to hit the maintainability wall from poor design. So, while maybe it's >100K lines of C that's where it typically happens, it might only be 10K or 20K lines of Ruby.

Perhaps. Though I'd rather deal with a messy 10K lines than a messy 100K. And having less code helps you keep it clean.

In a higher level language you get a lot of good design for free. For example nobody has to worry about GoTo-spaghetti-code any longer.

Second reply: Fail faster.