Being a Developer After 40
Being a 40+ developer myself, I find myself largely agreeing with this post.  I guess I could quibble over some small details, but by and large, I think the author is spot on.<p>The one thing I&#x27;ll add to this, is to say that, for devs like us, things like Coursera, Udacity, EdX, etc. are <i>really</i> valuable.  When you&#x27;re a mid-career professional who already has strong technical chops in at least one area, &quot;on demand education&quot; like this is super valuable in multiple regards:<p>1. It&#x27;s much more accessible since you don&#x27;t have to go sit in class, on campus, every day, etc.  You can fit it around your existing life much more easily.<p>2. It can serve as a nice way to start &quot;bridging&quot; to a new area.  For example, if you&#x27;re already, say, a skilled Java developer and you want to start moving into Data Science, MOOCs offer a nice way to pick up some additional credentials to help that transition.   People argue about the value of certificates from Coursera and the like, and that&#x27;s fair.  I think you don&#x27;t want something like that to be the <i>only</i> credential you have, if possible.  But taken as a <i>complement</i> to your existing credentials, experience and skills, I believe these things can be very useful.<p>3. Related to (2) above, but MOOCs can be a nice way to add complementary education outside of tech altogether.  If you&#x27;re a developer who aspires to eventually move into management or whatever, consider taking business classes from Coursera&#x2F;EdX&#x2F;Udacity as well.  There are some really nice offerings out there, including a complete (accredited) MBA program that you can do (partly) through Coursera in conjunction with the University of Illinois.  Or maybe you&#x27;re a Java developer (just an example, I don&#x27;t mean to pick on Java people, as &quot;I is one&quot;) who thinks that something to do with synthetic biology is going to be &quot;the next big thing&quot;, but doesn&#x27;t want to go back to school for a biology degree... great, there&#x27;s a ton of life sciences &#x2F; biology &#x2F; chemistry &#x2F;etc. stuff that you can take online if you want to start positioning yourself for something like that.<p>Let me also add this: I totally agree that you don&#x27;t need to go &quot;all in&quot; on every new tech that comes out, and try to ride the hype wave for everything new.  But, I think it&#x27;s smart to at least explore (many|most|some|??) of the trendy new stuff, to a limited depth... at least dip your toes in the water, do the &quot;Hello world of XXXX&quot; where XXXX is Swift, or R, or Rust, or Scala, or Node, or Go or whatever.  At least give yourself a fair chance to evaluate the new stuff, decide if you feel like it&#x27;s worth investing more in based on direct experience, and at least get a feel for the toolchain and what-not.  From there, you can kind of monitor what&#x27;s going on around you and decide if&#x2F;when to go deeper with new technology XXXX.    Yes, doing all this requires an investment of some time, but that&#x27;s part of the cost of keeping your value up.<p>Of course, the truth is, most of this goes equally for the &quot;under 40&quot; crowd as well.  But the whole &quot;keep learning new stuff&quot; thing probably becomes a little more important as you get older.  There might be exceptions like the whole &quot;COBOL programmer who gets paid big bucks because nobody new is learning COBOL anymore&quot; but I&#x27;d consider those situations to be exceptions.