This article is needlessly alarmist. Really, there are three ways you can go as you get up there in seniority:<p>1. If you're a good programmer, and you can/want to keep learning new things and jumping onto the latest technologies (ideally because you enjoy them for their own sake), you can be very successful as a senior/lead/whatever dev -- there is not a superabundance of skilled devs with a lot of pragmatic experience who are up on the latest techs. The downside of this approach is that you really do have to keep learning very aggressively; the instant you coast on what you learned five years ago, you're at risk of falling into the next category. (And that sounds obvious to anyone who's 23 -- the stuff you used five years ago is ancient! -- but once you're in your 40s, five years passes suspiciously quickly.)<p>2. If you're a mediocre programmer, and you don't want to keep learning new things and want to ride your old technologies, you can often get jobs in big companies/govt maintaining slow-changing legacy apps, and ride that out in comfort until you retire, but this is legit risky, because maybe that system will stay in use until you retire (I know devs who retired in the last few years, still maintaining COBOL apps running on VAX emulators)... but maybe it won't (I also know devs who lost their jobs well before retirement because the AS/400 applications they worked on got replaced by newer stuff, and they couldn't/didn't want to learn the new tech).<p>3. If you are good at management, and want to move into that, you can do that. This isn't some last-ditch escape hatch from development, though, it's a whole separate field that requires different skillsets, and not all devs are well-suited for it. Yeah, you have to know some tech to be a good manager of a dev team, but organizational and interpersonal skills are much more important. And also, experience here matters, too -- if you're trying to shift to management late in your career, you're competing against people who have a lot more management experience than you, which is going to make it challenging.