Difference between novice and experienced engineers

It has been said that good/experienced software engineers can be several orders of magnitude (i.e. 10x-100x) more productive than novice engineers. I think the main productivity improvement is the fact that experienced engineers are much better at detecting/avoiding bullshit:

It’s far more dangerous to assume people know what they’re talking about, than it is to assume they don’t and let them prove you wrong.

When I was a fresh engineer, I naturally did the work given to me by other people, without questioning if it was worth doing. As I got more experienced, I realized that most of the time people don't have thought through the job they are assigning to others. This results in getting stuck in dead ends, doing things that have no importance which result in lost time and motivation.

Nowadays, I am in my 20th year as an engineer. I pride myself in my analysis skills, ability to see signal through the noise and avoiding waste of resources. A lot of times I finish a job by demonstrating that the job in question is worthless/wrong. If you compare my lines of code per unit time, a novice might produce more. But that usually means producing garbage at a faster pace, creating more problems than solutions. That is why experienced people are worth their weight in gold.