[kevinmcconnell]

> It feels like a lot of these freelancing micro-entrepreneurship perspectives sort of ignore this aspect. It's hard to imagine people still doing it when they're 50.

Why do you say that? I’m asking this genuinely, as someone who is a) dipping my toe into freelancing and micro-entrepreneurship, and b) turning 50 next month :)

Personally I’m just looking for a way to find more enjoyment and meaning in my work, and to be able to balance my priorities in life a bit differently. Which is something I didn’t think much about when I was younger, but has come to be important to me as I get older. So to me, this sort of age actually seems like a natural time to want this approach.

[nonameiguess]

If nothing else, you eventually reach a state of seniority where the types of freelance work available that require the knowledge you have by 50 are quite a bit fewer than the number of 50 year-olds in the world, given that is still well below an average human lifespan. So it may work quite well for you, but it can't work for an entire economy. If everyone tried, most would fail, even if they all had identical skills and knowledge.

Note k__2's actual answer ended up being technical writing and developer relations. There is always going to less demand for developer relations than for actual developers. So if you say a career path should be something like be a FTE salaried developer from 20 to 30, and then "graduate" or whatever to freelance developer, then to developer relations, that's fine as long as you're in the smaller tier of people who can do that, given the world is going to have roughly the same number of 50 year-olds as 25 year-olds in an OECD nation.

The reason this hasn't been a problem yet in software is software itself is still an immature industry, so rapid growth has meant there are always a lot more 25 year-old developers than 50 year-old developers. That won't stay true forever. As the industry matures and reaches a stable size, more senior people are either going to need to stay code monkeys or we're going to see severe organizational rot with an inverted pyramid org structure with more managers and architects and developer relations specialists than developers. That will be true whether or not the organization is a single company or thousands of individual contractors.