I wonder about this too and find it’s hard to get good intel. First, there’s not many “old” hands-on technical types that I see anywhere. Reading material see

I wonder about this too and find it’s hard to get good intel. First, there’s not many “old” hands-on technical types that I see anywhere. Reading material seems so focused on hiring large numbers of people from early to late. So it’s hard to get evidence, but what I’ve been working on is being able to understand my organization and industry well to be able to code solutions to answer strategic questions that no one cares if I’m hands-on technical or not, but as long as the answers are useful. Just a few years into mid 40s but the work is no longer “build me this app/system/db/site” but hairy problems that require learning new frameworks, writing move approaches, etc. so that’s pretty fun and as long as my brain keeps working it seems interesting 5-30 years out. I recently talked with a 40-50 engineer through Lunchclub who was working as a “test driven development coach” that sounded horrible, but the way they described it was cool. They would mix design, code, and r&d to be part of teams and projects to help them code better. So they were just a senior dev who elevated above individual project design and they said they got there by just working on bigger and bigger projects before moving into this new role.