[AnimalMuppet]

I'm 62. I've been a software engineer for 39 years.

You can continue to be a software engineer all the way to a normal-age retirement. (I'm in the US, though - I don't know about France.) But you can't be the same software engineer for the whole time.

Your code should be better designed and architected than it was 10 years ago. You shouldn't write the same bugs you did 10 years ago. You should document your code better than you did 10 years ago.

Every five years or so, you should ask yourself what you need to learn now for the next few years of your career - and then learn it. (Hat tip to my wife.) One of the coolest things about software is that you can often get paid for learning that - you can find a project at your current company that will grow you in the direction you want.

What you cannot do is continue to be a better paid version of a junior programmer. You need to be more valuable than the new people. (This is why you don't need to worry about the "growing pool of software engineers" - it's growing largely by adding new people with no experience. They can't replace you, because they don't have your experience.)

[pims]

This is definitely on my radar, and not just technical skills which have a diminishing return at some point. Mainly understanding business considerations (product, market, timelines, costs, etc.) to be a person deciders can bounce ideas off of when still considering and defining features.

I like the personal five-year plan idea. It will help setting clear expectations and action plans. Thank you!