The other day I came across this interesting article about "old coders", that made me reflect a lot.

There is a very famous estimation which says that every 5 years the number of programmers double. Another way of putting it is that every 5 years, half of the programmers have less than 5 years of experience. I still have like 35-40 years until I retire (if laws stay the same)...

Let's do a little bit of math: I'm already in the 50% with 5 or more years of experience, so (assuming that the estimation is correct and that I want to work as a programmer until I retire) in 35 years I'll be part of the 0.39% oldest programmers. Which also means that I will have to compete against the rest of the 99.61% of the programmers for a job. That is a pretty scary number.

It looks like programmers fight this by transitioning into management oriented positions even though most of engineers I know don't like managing people.

What are your thoughts about this?