A couple tips to ensure your ongoing success in the market:
1) Continuously invest in your skills 2) Constantly improve your storytelling and communication skills 3) Network relentlessly. Make it habitual. Follow up. Care. 4) Be fanatical about taking care of your clients 5) Nourish your sense of curiosity about technology. Eliminate toxic projects or jobs which feel like they are burning you out. 6) Have a value proposition beyond "I can write code". Develop some domain/industry-specific expertise.
For each of the above, apply the 10X Rule. Execute at a level of 10 times the effort that you originally think you'll need.
I sometimes wish to do something real for improving humanity well being, but all my attempts failed so far :)
I am telling people that if you want to make money, you should avoid competitive fields and since crisis is there, and devs are still excessively well paid, it gives an incentive for all kind of people tied by whatever pressure (social, debts, financial) to become a coder to make money fast, and for bosses to put more pressure.
If things worsen, I think I am gonna try to propose the funding of my own sect on kickstarter (rael is my model), or coin the term factorer instead of developer which purpose would be to decrease the costs of having stupidly non reliable/deterministic technologies (mongoDB, hadoop, cloud, systemd, USB, oauth2) and excessive costs (big data that are useless for making money, the costs of cloud that are non linear thus non predictable...) to bring back some sanity to this world and more money to the workers really add values to our existence. Or maybe, just stay what I am : a troll :)
I think what she views as optimal now is finding a job that will let her explore any new technology. She got excited about an opportunity with the .NET stack, until they lowballed her with an offer about half of what she's currently making (developing a same-old jQuery website).
She's getting calls from recruiters every day, so it's surprising to me she's having such a hard time finding the right job for her. Also she doesn't think she's competitive with the younger crowd, so she's not even looking at certain jobs on the West Coast.
Previously a developer at zulily building their supply chain software. When I first started the SC team was all around 30, it was only right before I left that the first under 30 was hired. There are a couple now.
Is it interesting work?: Games _are_ different, so the past 6 years have been quite interesting. What I do relates to the games as does, say, CoreAudio relate to music Apps on iOS. And then, one is working inside a company that makes game consoles. Playing them is in the job description. As is breaking them.
Is it in demand? I honestly have no answer for that. But - there are not many game console manufacturers any more. There's the behemoth surrounding us, but I believe they recently downsized a bit, no idea about PSP at all, and us - Nintendo. Specifically, Nintendo Technology Development. We're small.
http://www.quora.com/What-do-people-in-Silicon-Valley-plan-t...
Founder of Wikipedia, Whatsapp, Craigslist, Pandora, Zipcar, etc. responded
One thing about doing development at this age is that since you've stuck with it, if you didn't get stuck in a rut in your career, you should have some pretty serious technical chops.
As an entrepreneur, there's no expiration on my work life that I don't set myself.
The last six years of my life have been the most productive, by far, in terms of churning out value and being good at what I do. I can't work as long of hours any more without feeling it, but I'm vastly better and smarter now; I know a lot more of what not to do and where not to waste my time.
P.S. you're pwned.