Ariel is a personal site from an Australian programmer, hosting jokes, programming-language comparisons, and a talk by Richard Stallman on software patents.
HN commenters mostly cite it for 'The Evolution of a Programmer' joke, linking the original page when other copies die, and applying it to new situations.
Knowledge != Experience. Education, Sex, Race, pffh - all bullshit - experience trumps all of it. Top talent doesn't need bullshit technicalities and qualifications to shine and anyone that uses any of the above to tear others down has hit the glass ceiling of their own ability and see no other way to look good without tearing others down. In day to day life, these people sometimes seem like they are getting ahead, but in my experience, you can't escape karma and these folks almost always get weeded out over time (on a competent team).
I'm sure you've seen the image showing the creation of a simple program and the variations created during different stages of a programmers career (http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html). You aren't the exception, you will find yourself following this exact progression in your career.
Oh, and mind your ego, rockstar's aren't worth the trouble if they are a complete asshole to everyone around them. No one, I repeat, no one, is worth so much. Also, don't tie your self-worth to your career and job level - it'll hurt 10x more if and when you get laid off or fired the first time. It's not personal, it's just business.
Last thing, no matter how valuable you think you may be to the company, the closer you are to the frontline of bringing new money into the biz and the easier this correlation is seen by management is the real measure of how important you are to the company. Sales is the lifeblood of any company, don't…
Look up things like Geos (graphical 8-bit OS) or look at the original Quake source code. The stuff we develop today is woefully inefficient compared to software of the past. I routinely use apps on my quad-core 64-bit notebook that are slower than comparable apps on old sub-100mhz 32-bit machines in the late 90s.
One factor is certainly as elsewhere stated the pressure to ship fast and cut labor costs, but I'm not convinced this is the biggest. I think the biggest factor is that developers love to over-engineer.
This is so, so true:
http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html
Apparently 9 previous threads (with almost no comments) just isn't enough. https://hn.algolia.com/?query=The%20Evolution%20of%20a%20Software%20Engineer&sort=byPopularity&prefix&page=0&dateRange=all&type=story
For those not in the know, it's a variation of an old theme. http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html , which is a Haskell version, says it goes back to at least 1995.
The traditional version (that is, the one I remember) is more akin to http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html .
Half of those are incorrect implementations that junk the stack and most of the rest are idiotic rebaked jokes from the late 90s. Nowhere near to http://www.willamette.edu/~fruehr/haskell/evolution.html which is not only enlightening but actually funny when it tries to; or even to http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html which was funny when it started and still is the original. Can we stop making HN into the next xkcd?
I think it is. To paraphrase a certain famous man,
" Some people, when confronted with a problem, think
'I know, I'll use Method Chaining.' Now they have many more problems."
If you read the article, you'll see those problem mount and mount and the proposed solutions are more and more hideous. Thus humor. Akin to this really: http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html
It's a hello world: http://www.ariel.com.au/jokes/The_Evolution_of_a_Programmer.html
And I digress. Every growing C programmer pass into a stage where he wants to push that Seasoned professional code into the least amount of lines possible. Even if nobody can read the lines.