On Programming Languages: Why My Dad Went from Programming to Driving a Bus
This is a good object lesson for the common advice of "do what you love".  If you really love working with computers, then it is really hard to resist messing with them all the time.  So you have a side effect of constantly improving your knowledge.  But if you don't love it, but are only into programming because you can make money at it, then you won't be driven to constantly learn (even if that learning is just a side effect of "playing").  Now that doesn't necessarily mean that you will be an expert at everything, but people who have a passion for this type of sport will be in a position to pivot when needed.<p>I've run into people in similar situations, they used to be a systems administrator or a developer, but are completely out of it and no longer able to write any code.  In some cases it is burn out, but I couldn't imagine ever going so much as a week without experimenting with something that is intellectually stimulating.<p>Now it may be that the protagonist in this story really did have a passion for translating business logic rules into Cobol.  But was he really doing programming, or was it more following a set of procedures that ended up cranking out the needed code, without having to really invest a lot into the process?  Because if there was a strong passion there, I'd think it would have extended to continuously tinkering around with other technology.  (Or am I getting dangerously to the "no true Scotsman" fallacy?)