He's now fully retired but my dad moved pretty heavily into microcontroller work at the very end of his career. It seemed to be an area that leaned towards olde

He's now fully retired but my dad moved pretty heavily into microcontroller work at the very end of his career. It seemed to be an area that leaned towards older, more experienced developers with lots of electronics experience (which he had). If I had to extract any pattern I see with older developers who are doing well, it's that those who can connect together a life of experiences (such as with electronics, management, medicine, law, or other areas they may have worked in) can really make more sense for many projects than less experienced developers. It's no coincidence that it seems to be the older developers who are the TDD, BDD, Agile, etc. gurus - they're the ones with the years of experience of dealing with people and applying that to our discipline.