Wow man - Sorry you had such bad time :-/ Hopefully you got something fun now :-)
I have noticed over the years that interviewing has gotten more onerous and ghosting has gotten more common. There's never any reason to treat people badly/ghost them. Even a thanks-but-no-thanks is better then radio silence.
I'm glad it is like that, I'm concerned for anything at 60+, in the end 5 years of income is quite a bit, hence why I am trying to plan ahead for retirement
sounds like a good plan :-) Trick is to be on the edges - either leading edge or trailing edge. That's where the competition is lowest and the compensation is highest. I do cloud architecture/infrastructure atm, but I figure I'll fund my retirement by being the last living COBOL programmer :-P
I thought about that, but Java is also the most widespread language, so I don't know if it will be similar to COBOL (I don't know how widespread COBOL was)
COBOL was very widespread - there used to be more lines of COBOL in production then any other language (Mostly mainframe and (super-)mini computer stuff (banks, govt, insurance, etc.)
In another 20-30 years, Java might be a lot less popular then Go, Rust, Python, Ruby, etc? So lots of Java that needs maintenance and not many people left to do it??
My employees were close to my age, and got jobs, but it took years. These were top-shelf C++ geeks.
I was treated pretty badly, and decided it wasn’t worth it.