[ido]

while not as old as OP, I personally know several programmers in their 50s and 60s and all said they had no problem finding work.

I think if you're a top-tier developer (which OP seems to be!) age discrimination may not be as much of a factor? If you're decent but not amazing (most of us honestly) you may find it easier to find work at 35 than at 55.

[mikekchar]

I'm 52 and am just starting to look around. Given that I primarily want world-wide remote (I live in Japan), it may be a tad difficult. However, I had no trouble at all attracting interest in my mid 40's when I went to London for a couple of years. It took me less than a month to land a job and I had a couple of options.

My biggest piece of advice to anyone who wants a long technical career is to keep learning new things. Don't rely on your day job to train you in what you need. Follow up on stuff that interests you and invest some of your "me" time on staying current in areas that interest you. I've seen a lot of people drop out of the industry because they were over specialised. I know APL experts, Cobol and DB2 experts, C++ with MFC experts, etc, etc. None of them are working as programmers any more. It's tempting to thing that Java enterprise and C# and Ruby on Rails and Python and whatever you think is the best paycheck will last forever. It won't and over time you will slowly become obsolete. A 40 something (or 50 something) with no relevant technology experience will be seen as less valuable than a 30 something because people will be imagining you are simply going through the motions. The fact that you aren't getting sucked into the new (and horrible) programming fads makes you even less attractive because the people hiring you have been pulled into those fads. So it's important to be able to speak the speak and walk the walk.

[ido]

Maybe I'm unusually fortunate that a lot of day jobs I've had at one point or another gave me an opportunity to learn new tech (that wasn't the one that got me hired there). In the past 5 years I've mostly been alternating between c# & javascript/typescript.

There would be new projects & not many people in the company experienced in the tech required (due to hiring staff that has experience in their bread & butter current projects) and it was often pretty easy to jump on those ships - it does require the confidence that you'll be able to ramp up quickly!

Also when a technology is new there is a shortage of people with experience using it & companies relax experience expectations when hiring.

[blub]

So what are the MFC experts doing nowadays?

Anyway that's precisely the problem - either get sucked into all the horrible fads or not finding a job. That's a pretty bad choice.

[bcrosby95]

Learn just enough about the fads so you can hold a conversation about them, but don't invest heavily in every one of them. You don't need to tech hop every year - give things at least a couple years to shake out. This will let you skip a lot of the time wasting BS that comes with fad driven development.

[mikekchar]

This is great advice. The other thing about learning a little bit about all the new fads is that you can fairly quickly figure out bits where going a bit more deeply will help you out in general. For example, I would not recommend using React for every front end project (or even most ;-) ), but playing with React and understanding what it was trying to accomplish legitimately made me a better programmer.

[abalashov]

This. This is how I treat customer fads as a consultant, so far to good effect. Consulting isn’t too different than interviewing for jobs, especially the part where you have to convince new customers that you know what you’re doing and are worth your rate.

[dpau]

you're right, not all of us can be super star devs (i certainly am not) but we can apply their techniques, mainly stay healthy and never stop learning.