I just turned 65. Own 1 person custom software development company and am very much active professionally. Started programming in the 80s while working as a research scientist.
> As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?
An anecdote for you...
In Summer 1997 i was 24 at a family reunion, listening to my grandmother and several other seniors talk about some recent interaction my grandmother had had with a delivery person. One of her friends asked her, "how old was he?"
i'll never forget either her response or my jaw-dropping which followed:
> As a ~20 year old this feels so weird to read. I'm still considered young in ~10 years?
One of these days, maybe as early as your mid-/late-40s, you will be consulting with your a medical doctor and realize that you are the oldest person in the room.
It's all relative. When I was 20, I'd consider myself old at 36. Now when I am 36, my definition of old has shifted and it's now somewhere past 50. I guess "old" for a person is just that person 10+ years older :)
Careers could be very very long. My relative was kicked out of academia after finishing his postdoc and has to work manual jobs till the end of comunism in my country. His career actually started after 60 and he died just a few weeks before his announced retirement at the age of 96, teaching 5 to 6 classes a year in CS department.
Back when I was a teenager, people in their 20s were “old farts.”
Nowadays, I look at people in their 40s, as “kids.”
Here’s my first ever engineering project (1987): https://littlegreenviper.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/TF30...
I was 25, at the time, and a fairly newly-minted EE.