The 23-Year Ceiling: Why Tenure Is Not Always Expertise

The projector hums at a frequency that feels like it is drilling into the base of my skull. It is a persistent, 63-hertz whine that nobody else seems to notice. I am sitting in Conference Room 3, obsessively rubbing a smudge off my phone screen with the edge of my sleeve. I’ve been at it for at least 13 minutes. Every time I think I have cleared the oil away, a tiny iridescent streak reappears under the harsh fluorescent lights. It is a distraction, a way to avoid looking at Rick, who is currently dismantling the future of our department with a single, practiced sigh.

Rick has been with the company for 23 years. In this office, that number is treated with the kind of reverence usually reserved for ancient religious relics. If Rick says a process is sound, it is etched in stone. If Rick says a technology is a fad, it is dead on arrival. He is the ultimate gatekeeper, the sovereign of the legacy stack. But as I watch him cross his arms, I realize that Rick doesn’t actually have 23 years of experience. He has one year of experience that he has repeated 23 times, like a broken record that thinks its skip is a rhythmic choice. He has mastered a flawed system and now perceives any improvement as a personal insult to his accumulated ‘wisdom.’

The Conservationist Analogy: Survival vs. Science

This is the phenomenon of the Expert Beginner. It is a term coined to describe someone who has moved past the novice stage and reached a level of functional competence, but then decided that they have reached the pinnacle. They stop learning because they believe there is nothing left to learn. They become comfortable in their inefficiencies. In a corporate setting, these individuals are dangerous because they occupy senior positions where they can effectively veto progress. They use their tenure as a bludgeon. When a junior developer suggests a more efficient way to handle data validation, the Expert Beginner doesn’t engage with the logic. Instead, they recount a story from 2003 about a server crash that has absolutely no relevance to modern architecture. They list 3 reasons why the change is ‘risky,’ all of which are based on limitations that haven’t existed for 13 years.

The Cost of Comfort

I look back down at my phone. The smudge is finally gone, replaced by a microscopic scratch that I know will bother me for the next 53 days. I think about the 103 projects we’ve stalled on because they didn’t align with ‘the way we do things here.’ It is a form of organizational rot that starts at the top. When we prioritize years of service over the actual ability to adapt, we create a sanctuary for mediocrity. Rick is currently explaining that our manual entry system for client invoices is ‘more secure’ than an automated API. He cites a single instance in 2013 where an automated script had a typo. For him, that one error justifies 13 years of unnecessary manual labor and 333 lost man-hours every quarter.

The Timeline of Resistance

In the world of finance and logistics, this resistance is particularly toxic. I’ve seen companies cling to spreadsheets that are so bloated they take 33 seconds just to open, simply because the ‘expert’ who built them in the late nineties refuses to let go of the control. They view modernization not as a tool for growth, but as a threat to their necessity. If the system becomes efficient and easy to use, what happens to the person whose entire value proposition is ‘knowing where the bodies are buried’ in the old system? They are protecting their own obsolescence by ensuring the company stays as obsolete as they are.

Shifting Value: Learning Rate Over Tenure

We need to shift the culture toward valuing ‘rate of learning’ over ‘years of knowing.’ A person with 3 years of experience who is constantly iterating and questioning their own assumptions is infinitely more valuable than a 23-year veteran who is calcified in their ways. This is why modern platforms like cloud based factoring software are so disruptive. They don’t just offer a new way of doing things; they bypass the need for the ‘gatekeeper’ who has built a career on the complexity of legacy systems. They provide a streamlined, AI-driven path that makes the old, ‘expert’ way of handling factoring look like tilling a field with a hand-plow while a tractor sits idling in the barn.

I’ve made 43 mistakes in the last week alone. I acknowledge them. I try to fix them. Sometimes I even admit them out loud. It is exhausting, but it is the only way to avoid becoming Rick. I find myself constantly checking my own ‘expert’ tendencies. Am I rejecting this idea because it’s bad, or because I didn’t think of it first? Am I defending this process because it works, or because I’m the one who designed it 13 months ago? It takes a certain amount of mental hygiene to keep your perspective clear. It’s like cleaning that phone screen; you have to do it constantly, or the grime of your own biases will eventually make it impossible to see the truth.

The Confidence of Stagnation

Rick is still talking. He’s moved on to the 33rd reason why we shouldn’t migrate our database. He looks confident. He looks like a man who knows exactly what he is doing. And that is the most terrifying part. There is no doubt in his eyes. He is perfectly comfortable in his stagnation. He is the master of a dying world, and he will continue to rule it until the last 3 servers blink out of existence. I wonder if the farmers Olaf D.-S. worked with felt that same confidence as their land blew away in the wind. Probably. There is a certain peace in being the expert of a disaster.

If we want to build something that lasts, we have to be willing to kill our darlings every 3 years. We have to look at our most ‘senior’ processes with a skeptical eye. Just because a method has worked for 23 years doesn’t mean it was the best method; it just means it was enough to survive. In a rapidly evolving landscape, ‘enough to survive’ is a death sentence. The Expert Beginner is the anchor that prevents the ship from moving, even when the engines are screaming to go forward. They will tell you the anchor is necessary for ‘stability,’ but really, they are just afraid of the open sea.

The Final Reckoning

I finally put my phone away. The screen is clean for now, but I know it won’t stay that way. The world is messy. Data is messy. Experience is messy. But the moment we stop trying to see through the mess-the moment we decide that our current view is the only one that matters-is the moment we stop being experts and start being obstacles. I look at Rick and realize he isn’t the problem. The problem is the 83 percent of the room that is nodding along with him, too afraid of his 23 years of tenure to suggest that maybe, just maybe, he hasn’t learned a single new thing since the turn of the millennium.

There are 13 people in this meeting. Only 3 of them are under the age of 33. The power dynamic is clear, but the outcome is predictable. We will leave this room and continue to do things the ‘proper’ way, which is really just the most familiar way. We will waste another 13 months on a process that should take 3. And Rick will walk back to his office, satisfied that he has once again protected the company from the ‘dangers’ of progress. He will feel like a hero. He will feel like an expert. And he will be absolutely, fundamentally incorrect.