Many times this question has come up. All oldsters have different stories, but the one constant seems to be that programming is what we do anyway, and still a b

Many times this question has come up. All oldsters have different stories, but the one constant seems to be that programming is what we do anyway, and still a bit surprised people want to pay us. I'm 67, wrote my first program in 1963, been employed in computers since 1967, traversed the entire stack from hardware through designing 4G graphical programming languages, with a focus (if it can be called that) on embedded Real Time dataflow systems. A classification that maps well onto many kinds of products. I've never been tempted into management. Yes, I don't have the first ten years in my resume. But at the same time I've never got a job by submitting my resume through the front door. Never. Even my first (at a computer manufacturer, as a commissioning tech) was by referral. My current one via an internal recruiter who liked my generalist CV on Linked In and called me. Others by coworkers who moved on and called me along. You need to be visible, to be found, to be reckoned good, and to develop some kind of rep. In my case, at the junction between hardware and software. The other thing you need is to always keep learning.