Software Engineers Will Work One Day for English Majors

So true. BS, MS in CS, Bell Labs, Sun Microsystems, several SV startups including working for Elon at his first company. But I'm 52 and not a chance I could get in the door at google or any place in the valley now. I'm happily employed but for less than half what I once made.

I'm not sure they are wrong either. I'm not longer willing to work all night or to be the only one to stay over christmas to pump out yet another release. Nor am I willing to release buggy code because some marketing puke promised it would be ready by Wednesday. And yeah I still go to makefiles instead of scons or CMake, and I don't give a shit about Haskell or Scala.

So it makes sense to hire that 26 year old who you can milk for 10 or 15 years before kicking to the curb. And he won't even see it coming. Hopefully he will have saved those options and salary so he can weather the transition to another career.