Interesting (and scary for me!) article. I am 40 in 5 months. I started out my career in startups (or dotcoms as they were called then!) in 1999, and moved to more corporate employers in around 2008 (by more corporate, think BBC and comparable companies). I’ve just moved back into startups 3 months ago after getting disillusioned with being a developer in a room of 70+ developers, with no easy way to display my other talents. For example, I’m pretty good at product stuff and stakeholder wrangling, but at my former company, all product was done by the product office, not developers.

So, I am thoroughly enjoying being at a 7-person startup, but yes I do feel “old” and I do worry that my career has a time limit on it. I have no desire to move into management or the C-suite or anything like that — I just want to write code and be listened to when I have product ideas, if that makes sense? My current employer really values my experience and my ability to hit the ground running (which I think is a common trait of someone who’s had such a long dev career as I have) and I hope that it continues for a long time. Otherwise I’m not sure how I’m going to pay my bills!