Well he clearly has a curious mind... I think you only get burnt out once you can't keep up, or once nobody is interested in the things you spent your career on

Well he clearly has a curious mind... I think you only get burnt out once you can't keep up, or once nobody is interested in the things you spent your career on. But he happened to spend his career on something that is still profoundly interesting to people. The open source world is very much in the old architecture he was talking about, so it appears that Microsoft compilers are simply more advanced. (And Borland and Jetbrains did this too, just not open source compilers) There are several programmers at my company who are in their 60's, and I think even 70's, past retirement age. All of them are super sharp; they are not "code monkeys". I think those types tend to leave the industry sooner.