I was a dev for 20 years at the same company - went from being an Assembler and BCPL programmer to C, C++, Visual Basic, learnt web stuff when that came along. Then the mid-life crisis hit ( well, more like my daughter was grown up so I had freedom to move ), thought about career changes and became a tester. A few years after that I moved from the UK to the USA and am loving my new adventure. Working at a small company as their main exploratory tester, working on several projects at a time, all sorts of domains and techs and still learning new stuff.

The devs I worked with for 20 years either stayed and stagnated with average pay rises every year, moved onto new firms to get a bigger pay rise, one went contracting then earnt a lot of cash and retired to be a farmer in Cornwall. Another dev retired with a nervous breakdown