Really? There are certainly a lot of young programmers who think they are extremely talented and productive, but 'twas ever thus. I'm still waiting to meet the 20-year-old who is as smart as I'm sure I was when I was 20. :-)

> The kind of education you can provide yourself if you really dive into the open-source world and things like github simply wasn't available even ten years ago.

And why would you assume that people who have access to that and ten years' extra experience would be somehow inferior to those who have access to that without the extra experience? The availability of open source code to explore is a potentially useful resource, but it's only one resource. Reading is still no substitute for doing, and it's not like many of the older programmers today never worked on hobby projects before the Internet came along.

The same explosion of knowledge that open-source and github has spawned has created a wealth of new niches that are quite promising but generally underexploited. Everybody's piling into Ruby on Rails, Django, JavaScript, iPhone, and Android development. How many people are piling into things like computer vision, large-scale data mining, wearable computing, or robotics?

Search was not sexy in 1998. E-commerce was sexy. Everybody piled into E-commerce, which left the field wide open for Google to come in and clean up while Pets.com withered away and died.

If not, re-read Patrick's comment with that in mind.