The way we build software teams and manage developer careers is broken. Exponential growth in people entering the profession means more experienced developers are greatly outnumbered. This is compounded by a tendency to promote the most experienced developers into "hands-off" management roles, where no longer influence developers day-to-day at the "code face". This leads to a profession of "perpetual beginners", and an effective skills shortage that holds many organisations back. A new model is needed; one that keeps the most experienced developers working on code (while still progressing in the organisation), that accelerates learning through structured long-term mentoring, and that treats effective dev teams as valuable assets that require ongoing investment, and not fixed costs that need to be disposed of as soon as the work is "done". Finally, we'll look at a business model that could give devs the control we need to achieve this: the software development "practice".