I'm over 40, and I've seen some developers evolve into awesome mind-bending experts, highly specialized in a certain domain or tech, but from my personal point

I'm over 40, and I've seen some developers evolve into awesome mind-bending experts, highly specialized in a certain domain or tech, but from my personal point of view the majority opted for a more stable, less riskier path and went for a stereotypical nine-to-five. The odds that you'll find one of the second group actively contributing in online communities is rather small. And about the ageism: yes, you can still be a very experienced developer, even when over 50 or more. I know a few specimen, and they tend to be very efficient and good in what they do, because they already made most of the mistakes one can make, and learned from it... For me personally, I no longer feel the need to pick a fight if someone is wrong on the internet. [0] The stackoverflow stats remind me of story from world-war 2 about survivorship bias: People checked planes that survived a dogfight for bullet holes, and assumed they should put extra armour on those spots that were hit the most, to increase the odds of survival. Luckily a guy called Abraham Wald [1] had the insight to put the armour in the spots with the least bullet holes, as the planes that came back obviously survived because they were not hit in certain spots. [0] https://xkcd.com/386/ https://xkcd.com/386/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Wald