Just turned 52. I just started a new job at a great company, after 11 years with Microsoft (7 of which were my "dream job"). The new work is fantastic, and I'm

Just turned 52. I just started a new job at a great company, after 11 years with Microsoft (7 of which were my "dream job"). The new work is fantastic, and I'm learning a ton of new stuff. I see programmers get trapped into thinking they are too old and have to manage. After a couple years of no programming they've often lost the knack and all they can do is tell other people what to do. It is incredibly hard to recover from this. In fact, there are lots of ways to get trapped. I won't enumerate them, but "getting into management" and "not learning new stuff on a continual basis" are classic ones. If you become the expert on something; if you're the "go-to" person in a large group for a particular piece of technology, my advice is to find something else to do, within a year or two, or you're gonna be stuck. Nothing lasts forever in this industry.