I'm probably older than you (almost 30) and I don't think you're aware of the long-term career risks in this industry. I'm also almost 30, and am one of the yo

I'm probably older than you (almost 30) and I don't think you're aware of the long-term career risks in this industry. I'm also almost 30, and am one of the younger people here. Maybe half of the people who were here (on the same team as me) when I started in 2007 are still here, but not all on the same team any more. A couple have been here thru several acquisitions, and long enough to have stories about losing the office we had in the World Trade Center. My direct supervisor has been with the company in various roles (not all IT) longer than I've been alive. It's the career problems that make this game an unholy mess: the fact that most so-called "tech" jobs are career-killing, subordinate wastes of talent that slowly turn you into an unemployable idiot. So don't accept that. My job was supposed to be translating "this field goes here" into Informatica (etl tool) mappings; ie code-monkey on a shitty non-textual turing-incomplete proprietary "language". Instead, after learning Informatica and SQL and PL/SQL all while on the job, I started writing things to automate the more repetitive parts. Now most of my time is spent maintaining and improving a set of tools for the rest of the team, which I (re-)wrote in C#, PL/SQL, Java, and the occasional bit of C, Perl, or Unix shell script. It's the risk that you'll be 37 and taking orders from a 25-year-old "tech lead" who only knows half a programming language and won't listen to your ideas. That seems a bit exaggerated, but I suppose it could happen if management was all technically clueless and you never bothered to learn anything resembling people-skills. Worst of all, at that age you probably have a spouse and kids, so suicide isn't an ethically defensible option. Um... go talk to a psychiatrist? Please?