My wife is an Economist for the state and spent some time as a Regional Analyst giving presentations to job seekers and those who help them. She said that the

My wife is an Economist for the state and spent some time as a Regional Analyst giving presentations to job seekers and those who help them. She said that the biggest hurdle an aging programmer seems to have is an inability to learn new languages and standards, because they feel that what they know is "good enough" These are the people without jobs. Her perspective is that so long as you are willing to embrace change, you will always continue to be employable in a changing market. Now, here's my perspective: Are you learning? If you aren't continuing to evolve as a programmer, that is when you need to worry. So long as you are tackling new challenges, learning how to write the same things you used to more efficiently and better documented, and keeping up with the changes in your languages, you will be alright. If you want to increase your rate of development, I highly suggest building and maintaining a collection of libraries and snippets that you commonly use to help facilitate faster deployments. It may take longer to condense things into classes and libraries at first, but soon you will be able to rip out new features faster than ever before.