That's all fine and dandy and good for ya, but it means nothing on large enough scale. Many folks face mental decline around 60 years, not dramatic but slow and

That's all fine and dandy and good for ya, but it means nothing on large enough scale. Many folks face mental decline around 60 years, not dramatic but slow and recognizable enough to be an issue in large teams. Old people in IT I've met in past 17 years are always 1) excellent in domain knowledge; 2) extremely grumpy compared to young folks unless they do only what they want (impossible in large corps); 3) team work can be challenging not only due to 2) My mom is retiring in few days. She ran basically 2 high school's economic department (that covers a lot of properties outside just school ones) for decades. School principal begged her to stay longer into retirement. Her job is crunching a lot of numbers into perfection where thousands of transactions end up matching up to a cent, and a lot of corner cases. Following closely every law change etc. They will need 3 other people to replace her. Mentally, she is facing visible decline, my father says so, I can say so. It will take few decades for it to become a real issue in general life. Great for her to retire now and not later. My father is similar - begged by CEO of his company to work through retirement. He stayed because he was saving up for his lifelong dream - Harley Davidson. Also replaced by team of 2-3 people. +-Same story - fine health, but clean decline. Both can be annoyingly grumpy. Both are still generally sharp mentally. But it would suck greatly for them to work more. Having a good life for them means something else. Sorry of largely off-topic rant, 40 is IMHO fine age to be a senior dev or whatever position would be named in given company. I am 40 and exactly there, happy with how much money I get for the amount of work I put out, don't want to step up to stream of endless bullshit, politics, meetings, powerpoints etc. and loss of creativity I can do when coding. Its stupid to push people higher if they are happy there. Like that, everybody wins. Otherwise, on long term, almost everybody loses.