Experience, growth and "il pizzaiolo finito"

We often receive CVs that state: I have 20/25/30 etc years of experience or we hear the fateful sentence "sono un pizzaiolo finito" which translated word by word means: I am a finished pizzaiolo. For the life of me I don't know why people use this expression. Granted, in Italian it doesn't sound as bad as in English, probably because we know what people mean by that "they are the complete package, they know all there is to know about their job". But still, it sounds so dreadful and it has got such a negative connotation. Being "finished" in any other walk of life would mean you have come to the end, you can't go on.

How can you ever be finished? There is so much to learn, to keep up with, to experiment that in our profession you can never be finished. We herd this time and again from the greatest pizzaioli we have interviewed in our Connecting the Doughs podcast. Pizzaioli like Federico de Silvestri, Filippo Rosato, Marco Fuso. They all reinvented themselves, carved new positions for themselves, found new business avenues, new techniques, new flours, ingredients etc. And they all are at the top of their game. So how can you be finished?

When you mention several decades of experience, has there been any growth in those years or you have just been repeating what you learnt in the first few years, time after time, without really learning anything new?

Is a person with 20 years of "meaningless" experience necessarily better than one with 5 years?

What's your view?

Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash