After reading many of the other comments, I've come to realize there's a big difference between the trajectories of those who are doing this now at 50 vs those

After reading many of the other comments, I've come to realize there's a big difference between the trajectories of those who are doing this now at 50 vs those earlier in their career now contemplating it. The biggest difference I can see is that in my era, people went into programming because they loved it and wanted to know everything about it. Once there was high demand and great starting salaries compared to anything else, things changed and many get into it for the lifestyle without the innate interests. > It's about the constant evolutionary changes that occur in the language definition, the compiler, the libraries, the application framework, and the underlying operating system, that all snowball together and keep you in maintenance mode instead of making real improvements. This paints a very different picture of software than how I perceive it. Most backend work is basically making plumbing and applying domain logic from one consistent persisted (or in-memory) state to another. My understanding of operating systems, programming languages, and databases hasn't changed for the most part in decades, only additional details being filled-in as I encounter them. I learned far more early in my career doing embedded C programming as a co-op, then later C++ multi-threaded programming for OS/2 and Windows NT, and lastly using a number of SQL databases. Programming languages, frameworks, and APIs were the least of my concerns like using some other plumber's toolbox while fixing a leak.