I work with a developer who is 70. He kicks butt. It's amazing. My father in law retired at 75, a C coder doing embedded systems for the chip industry. He didn

I work with a developer who is 70. He kicks butt. It's amazing. My father in law retired at 75, a C coder doing embedded systems for the chip industry. He didn't kick people around, but was respected and was getting stuff done. I'm 50. I'd be happy to be either of those two people. I have little sympathy for the people who say to themselves that they can stuff the career growth at 40 because they're doomed. Screw that, I have role models. One thing that seems to help is: Be on a mission. Be on a fucking mission from God, take charge of design AND do all the little crap. Build system maintenance and code cleanup, who does that? Hint: It's not scutwork to make sure that things are working well, all throughout a project.