How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers
I&#x27;ve worked with two types of older engineers:<p>1) Ones who keep up their skills<p>2) Ones who don&#x27;t<p>The former are a treasure trove of knowledge and skills, and provide substantially more value than anyone junior ever could. Going through so many computing eras gives a higher-level way of thinking about abstraction, or understanding computer architectures. They&#x27;ve hand-tweaked assembly, C, Java, and when they&#x27;re now doing JavaScript or Python, they understand all the layers of metal underneath. They&#x27;ve gone through flow charts, structured, functional, object oriented, and all the variants there-of. They&#x27;ve written high-speed algorithms to draw lines with pixels, to ray trace, and are now coding GPGPUs.<p>The latter are liabilities, bringing in 1980-era best-practices. They&#x27;re working on some legacy BASIC or COBAL system from the seventies, and surprised they can&#x27;t find a new job when that&#x27;s upgraded and they&#x27;re downsized.<p>I&#x27;ve rarely seen #1 and #2 mix. They&#x27;re very different crowds, and in very different types of companies.<p>My own experience is that I need to devote about 20% of my time to keep up, if I&#x27;m doing it on an ongoing basis, or about 1-3 months every 2-5 years if I do occasional deep dives. Basically, I dive headlong into whatever is the newest, trendiest stack, and get a product out using that, deeply learning all the deep things behind it too. That&#x27;s what works for me. YMMV.