At 59.803 years old, I can happily say that I have escaped having to work with C++, and will retire never to have progressed past VB6. I have never felt the heat of raging hoards of eager youngsters at my heels, trying to take my job. I did find a niche in scientific programming that began in 1976 when the first PC's started to come out
(not IBMs). I recently (the last 4 years) dabbled in IT, cause the young folks with their fancy mainframes and professional C++ skills could not seem to figure out how to manage scientific data from dozens of small data collection systems, provide quality control and tracability of the data, and deliver the data in a timely fashion to the scientist who need it. That is not all the youngsters could not do. I have been called in on a half-dozen occasions to rescue a simple software project that got bogged down for six months by a team of young programmers who simply did not understand the needs of the client, and tried so hard to sell them on elegant code, fancy user interfaces, multi-platform capability that will never be used, etc etc. In all cases when I was asked to help, I cracked open my VB 4,5, or 6 (as the case may be) and delivered a program that fit their needs in 30 days or less. These were not production type projects, of course, but small scale projects where wasting $200k on useless code mattered. One of the engineering rules we old farts learned is that over-engineering is almost as big a sin as under-engineering. Experience and maturity still count, but only in the appropriate field. New field at my age? Forget about it.