[jrochkind1]

True to some extent. Almost nobody gets to count on staying with the same company their whole life and collecting a pension anymore, though -- so I would not say that expectation exists in other industries anymore. Especially a pension. I don't think anyone outside of government really has pensions anymore.

Re re-training yourself as a software engineer... I wonder how often people really need to do this either... to keep getting top possible salary maybe, but just ("just"!) to keep getting a better salary than most of the USA? Maybe sometimes. But, I mean, there are still people making very very good money writing Fortran and COBOL... probably better money than you can make writing PHP -- and you can still make better money than most of the USA writing PHP! OK if you specialized in, like, Flash or ColdFusion, you probably had to learn something different.

[jrochkind1]

(Now somebody is going to tell me they still make good money writing ColdFusion! Apparently there was a 2021 release with a 2023 release expected, it is still a going concern. I used to get paid to write ColdFusion, like 20 years ago).