> It over-emphasizes the normativity of job security and not having missed a paycheck but if your calculus is at the level of paychecks in an era where develope

> It over-emphasizes the normativity of job security and not having missed a paycheck but if your calculus is at the level of paychecks in an era where developers are paid this handsomely, you might be optimizing for the wrong thing. Note that it's called "The Old hackers guide" and he mentions he started in '86 (roughly about the same time I started in tech, I'm in my late 50s). Job security definitely becomes more of the issue as you get into your 50s. The handsome pay is usually going to the folks in their 30s. The FAANG corps that pay handsomely aren't hiring devs in their 50s. > switching jobs every 4 years is not a bad thing I've had a lot of jobs over the last 5 years and a lot of downtime as well. If I didn't have to switch jobs every year or two, I wouldn't as interviewing is awful at my age - once they see that you're "old" you definitely feel that they have no intent to hire you. Mostly I only end up working for people who are my age or a bit older as they don't have biases against people in their own age group. But my contacts are retiring and there are less people around the industry in my age group every day. At this point I'm considering myself semi-retired. Fortunately I'm in a position to afford to be semi-retired. tl;dr: the view someone in their 30s sees ("aim for handsome pay") might be very different than the view someone is seeing in their 50s ("it's getting tough to find gigs at all").