There’s definitely a little truth to that, but the good ones are also more conscious over time of assumptions and dependencies and how to think about code and what to do and what not to do - and they will talk to you about it at length if you ask them. Half the problem is the young ones frequently don’t ask or listen. I was there once, young and full of pride and energy and not listening, and these days watch younger programmers nod their heads and then proceed to ignore any advice, even answers to their own questions. I don’t see unconscious competence causing many problems, aside from occasional impatience when working with someone who’s too green (or occasionally a bit stubborn about learning certain things.) Also the best older programmers will tell you to stop trying to be tricky & clever, they advocate learning how to write straightforward boring code, and it still takes programming for a couple decades yourself for that advice to sink in. Lawrence Kesteloot wrote a great piece about why this happens (also find other great programming advice sprinkled around his site): https://www.teamten.com/lawrence/writings/norris-numbers.htm...

The thing I see even more with seasoned programmers over time is conscious incompetence. We all start as unconscious incompetence, we all have no idea how much there is to learn, and people tend to assume that you can learn most of what is known in a career or lifetime. Then you learn a lot and grow older, and you find out that the visible bounds of what you don’t know grows much, much faster than the bounds of what you do know. The more you learn and the more you practice, the more you discover how very little you know. (BTW I first heard this from a retiring geophysicist, and have just noticed that it fits every great programmer I’ve worked with, as well as my own experience.)