It might be useful for those reading this thread to include location perhaps? In as so much you might be comfortable.

Might also be useful to give some idea of skill set previous job too so people can average themselves appropriately as I think that’s the intent here is to gauge where it hurts the most for this to happen and perhaps what skill sets might be seeing it more?

Maybe I’m wrong so I’m open to suggestions on improving this discourse

Would you mind sharing what tech you've been working with?

Are you on engineering or sales/manegement?

I am concerned that this may happen to me in a couple of decades. Can you elaborate more?

I wouldn't make any assumptions on the state of the workforce a few decades out. Things may change dramatically.

One thing that will definitely change is the demographics of the developer community, people who are 50 today who worked their career as programmers would have started in 1986 - 1990, There wasn't anywhere like as many programmers then as now.

So the number of older programmers moving down the pipe will grow hugely with the explosion in the number of programmers in the 90's.

That and to an extent the field is continuing to mature, We've only had the internet in most peoples homes for what, 18 years (not sure what the 50% line date was).

For me I find it's not hard to stay current since I devote my 'TV time' to programming and I like learning, I've also been careful not to find myself stuck in a niche by moving from one part of industry to another. My plan is to just stay current with the technology, I was raised on basic, pascal in the 80's, moved to C in the 90's, then Delphi, C# and the web.

It helps that the only constants in my life since I was a kid have been that I love reading and I love programming.

I leave work, go home, have a shower, something to eat and then program (or play chess) as a hobby.