If you think being an old engineer is tough, try being a new one.
Can you elaborate on this? I am a fairly new developer and haven't found it particularly difficult.
It's easy if you have 4 years of school to soak up knowledge. But if your family can't afford to pay your school fees, you end up working somewhere full-time. So you have to study nights. Except you fall in love and get married to a wonderful woman, but then she wants to spend those nights with you. So then you end up not sleeping and begging her to get a night-job so that you can learn how to install arch linux on a virtual machine. Becoming a software engineer when you have life commitments is tough, and you end up reading programming language books on your iPhone every time you go to take a crap. Believe me, it's hard.