After a while, you get people who know so much about a situation that when they leave, the code is frozen because no-one else knows quite how it works. And then you realize that perhaps only about 5-10% of all programmers ever are actually capable of programming in their head -- as opposed to the majority who merely reuse and recycle techniques they know work and don't have the imagination to see learning opportunities when they arise. Most programming is achieved with the latter type of programmer, not surprisingly. They simply don't have the talent to spot algorithmic errors before they become problems, and thus spend a lot of time doing a) band-aid fixes afterward and b) extending for trivial variants.

Wade, who still remembers when years ago a fellow programmer saw an array of structs that also had pointers to functions - two concepts in C he'd never known existed.