I'm almost 60. I trained as a s/w engineer / coder in the 1980s and then transitioned in the 90s into a customer-facing consultancy role with good domain knowle

I'm almost 60. I trained as a s/w engineer / coder in the 1980s and then transitioned in the 90s into a customer-facing consultancy role with good domain knowledge. Here are some specific observations on cognitive / corporate skills and how mine have varied, YMMV I definitely have more work 'wisdom' and can often spot problems that are not obvious to younger colleagues and even offer workable solutions, albeit not usually in the low level technologies. I have massively improved self-confidence that sometimes gets me through situations where my own knowledge / competencies are lacking. I can still learn, e.g. picking up C# and Visual Studio as a hobbyist to implement a Lisp interpreter [0] (I started six weeks ago and am on step 8 of 9 now, working on it in the evenings and rainy weekends). However, I think that it takes me longer to learn than it would have done once. I am definitely slower at navigating user interfaces, especially jumping immediately to a specific but not often used menu item. Younger me would have gone straight there. Improved search tools / repositories of online information make up for poorer memory of language syntax and APIs. I don't now have access to the code I first wrote to check it's complexity. Looking at documents I wrote several years ago, I don't think my vocabulary and writing skills have declined significantly. I have to continually remind myself not to be too dogmatic, especially where my knowledge is potentially out of date, or where I realise that my improved self confidence is masking the fact that I am actually wrong. [0] https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md https://github.com/kanaka/mal/blob/master/process/guide.md