Or they hit the stock lottery jackpot and have retired, or moved into management, or marketing, or started a sandwich shop. But I do think there's a bit of gen

Or they hit the stock lottery jackpot and have retired, or moved into management, or marketing, or started a sandwich shop. But I do think there's a bit of generational shift that the stereotype of outdated engineers haven't caught up with. When I started out in the mid-90s, anyone more than a little older than me didn't have a CS degree and had come up in a world without source control, continuous integration, automated testing, iterative development processes, open source libraries, etc, etc. So in some ways they were from a different planet than the next generation. Although the tech du jour still changes quickly, programmers in their 40s these days still have a comparatively small gap when it comes to education and development process.