If you're 36, you look around one day and realize you're the "old" dev. That's kind of the reality of the software industry, though. I moved into FAANG from a different engineering discipline, where engineers increase in value as they get older. In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.
> In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.
Kind of—but everything old is new again. I was surprised to find I actually have a pretty good understanding of Babel/typescript/webpack because they’re just reimplementing the c compiler and linker in JavaScript, albeit with very little solid documentation. Most of the interesting language ideas are pretty old—smalltalk still looks futuristic to me. Thinking about systemic failure is really hard and that takes time to develop.
If you're 36, you look around one day and realize you're the "old" dev. That's kind of the reality of the software industry, though. I moved into FAANG from a different engineering discipline, where engineers increase in value as they get older. In software, sadly, age isn't much of an asset. Most of what you spend your time learning today will be irrelevant in a few years.