Is Software Development Really a Dead-End Job After 35-40?
Yes, if you just want to coast. Coasting is certainly a perfectly legitimate goal, it just doesn&#x27;t work in this industry.<p>You have to constantly grow the breadth _and_ depth of your skill set.<p>Depth because, from a theoretical perspective, change in computer science is exceptionally slow and incremental. The basic theories and algorithms in the latest machine learning craze, for example, are not much different from those of 30 years ago. If you understood the 30-year-old theory, grasping the modern stuff is much easier. The big enabler has principally been from new hardware.<p>Breadth because what passes for &quot;skill&quot; today (just like it did yesterday) is effectively familiarity with tooling and buzzwords. You have to pay attention to how tooling and best practices evolve. The tools may be inferior and the best practices not very effective, but the productivity of teams and companies depends on everybody being on the same page. And even if the tooling and practices are worse, it won&#x27;t that bad. (See depth, above; change is slow and incremental.)<p>Personally, I took a mid-career break for law school. One of my varied reasons was because the law is perhaps the last professional domain where age and experience is still highly valued. Even a 21-year-old hot shot millionaire would rightly think twice before choosing as his counsel a young top-of-his-class Stanford graduate over a 70-year-old attorney with 50 years of experience in battle.<p>Philosopher-lawyers from Harvard and Stanford don&#x27;t have particularly good track records in winning cases. Another reason for my choosing to go to law school was my confusion about Lawrence Lessig losing his case at SCOTUS challenging copyright extension. That&#x27;s when I began to realize that maybe I (and others, like Lessig) was living in a bubble regarding my understanding not only of the law effecting my professional life, but the law more generally.<p>Plus, I did some of my best coding while going to law school. Nothing feeds your desire to hack like an extended absence from the grind of programming for a living. And being immersed in an unrelated body of knowledge seems to enhance creativity  when programming. I immediately returned to San Francisco after graduating and went back to coding (pay was better, anyhow), but every penny spent was well worth it. The stress, however, probably shaved years off my life. Law school is like bootcamp for the mind, but even more harsh and unsympathetic. My first year was pretty darned close to Paper Chase, including scenes where the professor chastises students in front of the class, tells them to get out of his class, etc. If only undergraduate school were like that. To see some students flunk out their first year only to return to try again was unexpectedly humbling and inspiring, more so than the sheer terror of being one of those to flunk out.