Is software development really a dead-end job after age 35-40?
I was going to add this as a reply to a comment downthread but I think it's too important to bury.<p>The fundamental rule of career progression in the technology industry is to position yourself as a <i>domain expert in something more specific than "programming"</i>.<p>It's very difficult to "own" "programming" in a way where you can use scarcity to drive integer multiple increases of the median salary. It is not as difficult to "own" distributed systems, sensor fusion, software security, or OS kernels.<p>As a general rule, the people getting outlandish half-mil-a-year offers from big tech companies are domain experts, and the people on Twitter shocked and upset that they're never seeing these offers are either (a) generalists or (b) people who have chosen to specialize on the craft of programming, rather than a domain to which programming can be applied.<p>That's not a value judgement! There are a lot of ways in which refining a true engineering discipline for assembling software is <i>harder</i> than kernel development or fast computer vision processing. It's just a statement about supply and demand, and about ease of demonstrating value.