Ah, the naïveté of youth.<p>Here's the thing about methodologies: anyone can use them. Any methodology that is popular enough for you to have heard about it was developed by one or more smart people and solved some real problem. Between now and then though, countless cargo-culters have jumped on the bandwagon and misapplied the methodology to the wrong problem in innumerable ways. Maybe they implemented it wrong, maybe they didn't have applicable problems, maybe they are as dumb as a box of rocks but have carved out a comfortable niche in a fat corporation somewhere. The point is, a methodology is <i>meaningless</i> out of context.<p>Hell, all ideas are meaningless out of context. In every day human life we tend to share a lot of context with those around us, in terms of software development—ie. the stuff of pure thought where the only limit is logic itself—we share considerably less so. When you're writing a web app you are living in a wholly different world from someone writing a Mars lander ROM, yet we call both of those things "software engineering". If you want to have good ideas and be competent you have to apply whatever ideas to the context you are in. Being smart is not about having the best ideas, but about evaluating how ideas apply to and interact with systems. The hardest thing about entrepreneurship isn't figuring out how to write software to do X, it's how to choose X such that a cascading chain of seemingly random events translate into market traction.<p>The horrifying thing about software development is the limited intelligence of the human brain to begin with. From a certain perspective we are hopelessly stupid and incapable of truly elegant software design, but on the other hand we are the only entities we know of with the capacity to write software at all! All this is to say you need to embrace ignorance and subjectivity, and simply pledge yourself to continual improvement. You do this not by latching onto ideas and filing them into good or bad buckets, but rather by processing a lot of them, applying them in practice, and seeing how those with more experience than you do the same.<p>If your curiosity outweighs your frustration over a period of decades, eventually I guarantee you will be at least a competent software developer, and maybe by then ageism in a tech will be something the kids laugh at like televisions with twisty knobs.