Speaking from my own personal experience I think you just graduated basic software school and went on to leading/management. My reasoning is: 1) After being round for 10 years you'd likly have enough experience to go round. 2) Not caring about getting to use latest technology lets you focus on important things: - What would be best for my company revenue? - What would enable me to deliver faster and more reliably? - What would get me to get home faster? Trust me when I say customers and your company CEO don't care if you know the diffrence of .Net 3 to .Net 2.0, they only want to know you can help developers write faster code and not do a mess while at it. I've seen cases of people that talk to you in Hexa decimal and can recite windows API backwards, most of them couldn't design half decent products or analyze why projects had problems.