In all walks of life, people with more experience are expected to be more formed, more of a known quantity, than people with less experience. The distinction between a junior candidate and a weak programmer is mostly down to the length of their CV. If someone has been programming for a few years, it's a bad sign if they're not very good at it.
You can spend ten thousand hours doing the first hour of the same work, at a bad job. There's a lot of bullshit positions with poor management that don't exactly lead to programmer development.
Yes. And if I'm expecting to hire a senior developer, I quite naturally don't want the person with that experience, because that's not an actual senior developer.
No, but if you had a crystal ball that could distinguish between those who had been given lots of opportunities but never improved, and those who just need a little bit of training to make them a world class engineer, then you'd have an amazing hiring advantage relative to your competitors.
I know some smart, thoughtful, enthusiastic developers who have only ever worked in one team, and that team had a bunch of dev practices that don't fit the industry's typical expectations (e.g. zero automated unit tests). Many companies would pass them over because they'd bomb that apart of the interview, but with a couple of months of on the job training, they'd fit right in.
When they go looking for a new job they're going to find it hard, but whoever can see through their inexperience an is willing to take a chance on them will be happy they did.
