You certainly don't have to do this. But let's face it programmers have a higher wages, in part, b/c the technology is constantly changing and the supply of tho

You certainly don't have to do this. But let's face it programmers have a higher wages, in part, b/c the technology is constantly changing and the supply of those who keep up is small. Since the structural barriers to most developers jobs are almost nothing (if you're good someone will give you a job and you can even work remotely for an NYC company from Bangladesh) the shifting sand of technology is what drives our wages up. Now here's where you can win. The hiring manager or business owner wants to minimize risk. If you have 20 years experience working on mainframes in cobol, chances are you're going to be an a passable programmer with good fundamentals. Now say the hiring managers company is using rails or node.js. You know you can learn it quickly. But The manager might be nervous that you that you don't like to adjust and you won't be productive for 2-3 months while you learn. Maybe he/she thinks you're going to be complaining the whole time about how node.js sucks (while you forget how much cobol suck). You can alleviate this worry by having a few simply projects up in node.js or whatever the latest craze is + you have good fundamental experience. So enjoy you're travels but maybe put a minimal side project up every year or so. That's my plan and I'd like to keep doing this developer thing for a while. I'd like to think, as someone who will eventually get old and have lots of experience on outdated stacks, these are some of the tactics we can use to combat ageism in engineering.