[choeger]

If you want to do anything competitively it's a young people's, and arguably very often a young men's (for reasons that are not fully understood yet), game.

I think that competitive spirit, or arrogance, depending on how old you are, lessens with age. Also, the older you get, the less time you can spend with any competition (try to play some MMOs against teenagers in your thirties). Finally, your body is peaking around 20. You can of course fight that and many top-level athletes compete at a very high level in their forties (think Fernando Alonso), but even these outliers are arguably less capable than ten years ago and have literally decades of experience.

Fortunately, programming as a profession is not a competition.