If you walk into any Fortune 500 "enterprise" environment, MOST of the employee developers working on the core business systems are typically in their 40's, 50's, and up.
It's not as "sexy" as tinkering with this month's Scala/Node/Go/Rust/Julia fad... but when you get older and have family and other commitments, perspective often changes. A lot of guys just want to "get things done", and then go have a life outside of work. To be fair, most developers continue to learn new technologies and skills throughout their life. But the drive to always be on the bleeding-edge with your professional work tends to be a trait of younger developers and smaller companies.
I think a large part of the fear of age is that we don't see a lot of middle-age web developers. That is because Generation X was really the first generation for which web development even EXISTED during our entry-level formative years! So I'm not convinced that we will all simply vanish into management 10 years from now. Rather, I think you'll just see a lot of middle age Gen-X web or Java developers, with perhaps younger guys focusing on newer niches (e.g. wearable devices, VR, pure client-side JavaScript with little to no backend, etc).
Or maybe web development will become a more cross-generational field, with middle-age and younger developers working side by side. Hard to predict the future with certainty. At any rate, I'm about to turn 40 myself, and I stopped stressing out about my "exit strategy" a few years ago. I'm currently working for an exciting small start-up. I ENJOY being hands-on with the code... and as long as I maintain that passion and desire to learn, I find that my income and responsibilities keep going up. I'm sure that will plateau at some point soon, and maybe decline later in life if I choose to slow down a bit. But I find that I'm still highly employable among the employers that I want to work for.
It's not as "sexy" as tinkering with this month's Scala/Node/Go/Rust/Julia fad... but when you get older and have family and other commitments, perspective often changes. A lot of guys just want to "get things done", and then go have a life outside of work. To be fair, most developers continue to learn new technologies and skills throughout their life. But the drive to always be on the bleeding-edge with your professional work tends to be a trait of younger developers and smaller companies.
I think a large part of the fear of age is that we don't see a lot of middle-age web developers. That is because Generation X was really the first generation for which web development even EXISTED during our entry-level formative years! So I'm not convinced that we will all simply vanish into management 10 years from now. Rather, I think you'll just see a lot of middle age Gen-X web or Java developers, with perhaps younger guys focusing on newer niches (e.g. wearable devices, VR, pure client-side JavaScript with little to no backend, etc).
Or maybe web development will become a more cross-generational field, with middle-age and younger developers working side by side. Hard to predict the future with certainty. At any rate, I'm about to turn 40 myself, and I stopped stressing out about my "exit strategy" a few years ago. I'm currently working for an exciting small start-up. I ENJOY being hands-on with the code... and as long as I maintain that passion and desire to learn, I find that my income and responsibilities keep going up. I'm sure that will plateau at some point soon, and maybe decline later in life if I choose to slow down a bit. But I find that I'm still highly employable among the employers that I want to work for.