Don't be too hard on yourself. You are working in a profession of increasing complexity, that requires more human intelligence, knowledge and experience than ever before.

Computer processing power is slowing - perhaps soon stalling - leading to the need to introduce multi-core chips, gpu powered numerics, parallelism, etc. There are only so many transistors that can be placed on a chip.

Therefore the big advances presently and in the future are going to come from programmers - advanced algorithms and more efficient code.

If you look at GTA 4 and GTA 5 the differences are astounding. But they both run on the same hardware. This is the result of some very intelligent and advanced programming practice that simply was not required, or available, 10 years ago.

It could also mean that experienced programmers may become more valuable in the future - much like other professions such as engineering where peak earnings typically occur late in the career.