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> If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be i

> If so, they must have been damn lucky not needing to look for work after they hit 45 or so... Or, are they doing stuff "nobody in their right mind" would be interested in doing, like Cobol or Fortran? I think the key(s), whether you're sixteen or sixty, are natural intelligence and a great work ethic. I'm fifty and am full-stack in whatevers with a side of devops/architecting. I frequently have to walk into a room and in less than thirty minutes figure out what the hell is going on, how I'm going to add value, communicate that to the stakeholders and then deliver. People seem to dig it. Fifty ain't so bad. What's COBOL?

jleyank 5y ago
COBOL is what gets a lot of people paid and probably underpins far too much in govt and larger companies. It’s rumoured to be the reason IBM keeps binary compatibility in their mainframe line as “they lost the source code long ago.” Supposedly, it’s a meal ticket for mostly old fart consultants. FORTRAN, on the other hand, is used to melt compute clusters while trying to make things go boom, or model micro- or macroscopic properties to design various things. Damned language still optimizes or runs large scale better. As you all know, few pay to rewrite code that works well.