Let's be clear on one point right away: I'm not old. At thirty-eight, I feel as young and full of energy as before - physically, intellectually, and in any other. Even though my children claim that I am already a decrepit old man, twenty times a day, in my own eyes I am still the same twenty-three-year-old developer that I once was. I still follow with great interest the emergence of new technologies and the development of the web in general, but in my industry I am already considered a specialist of not my first youth.
I'm lucky: I have a good senior position at a company that appreciates me, and I know the local code base inside and out. It is not difficult for me to implement new functionality, diagnose problems and quickly respond to new requirements. But at the same time, the codebase itself is a product of the bygone PHP / MySQL / JavaScript era.
From the point of view of my company, this is not a big deal. To tell the truth, our tasks do not need an ultra-modern frontend tied to a NoSQL document-based database. PHP / MySQL do an excellent job with all the operations that we perform day after day, and at the same time they get along without any problems with all the old applications that were born even before I joined the company. I have always preferred not what is in trend, but what works, and here they do not pressure me to modernize something just for the sake of modernization.
I work in an industrial manufacturing company. Our activities are considered vital, therefore, fortunately for me, the COVID-19 epidemic has not ruined the company and nothing threatens my work. But no one is immune. I have four children and a mortgage, and it suddenly occurred to me that I should at least look through vacancies in order to imagine the situation on the market, in case something changes. Honestly, the new perspective made me uneasy. Here are some of the lessons I drew for myself about the "old programmer" situation.
Need to spend more time upgrading skills
I have in no way neglected to become familiar with new technologies. I've played with many frameworks in recent years and some of them I honestly really like. I especially appreciated Vue and React - excellent web solutions that fully deserve their popularity. But in my case, the problem is that I don't need them to work. And I don't have as much free time as I did in my youth - you can't sit at night on personal projects to master a new instrument.
Many developers who have celebrated their thirtieth birthday and started a family will understand me here. But we must face the truth: we stay away from new technologies at our own peril and risk. You need to throw as much energy as possible to keep up with the times. After all, if the worst happens and you are left without work, the market will, first of all, expect from you the ability to work with fresh technologies.
It's time to expand the competence zone too
The times when the functions of a programmer were limited to writing code are rapidly receding into the past - or perhaps already gone. Deploy, working with the build environment, version control - all this (and much more) often appears in the list of developer responsibilities.
At the same time, a superficial acquaintance with the relevant tools may not be enough. Personally, I read a lot about Docker, AWS, Azure, Netlify and so on, but my practical experience with them is very, very limited - it just doesn't really need to. But if I am again thrown into the labor market, I have no doubt that I will hear enough from young and early twenty-year-old categorical statements that Docker is the crown of web technologies and without it I will not see any work as my ears.
Develop in yourself those skills that are not directly related to writing code. The more versatile you become, the more employers will value you in the future and the less likely you are to look like a dinosaur.
Don't despair: there is always a legacy code
In another life, I was one of a small but proud handful of ColdFusion developers. Let's face it, ColdFusion was more dead than alive even back when I was just starting to write in it. However, it was at the heart of many of the technologies I was working with back then. So I had to comprehend it at a rapid pace.
At that time, I subscribed to a whole bunch of groups, mailing lists and forums related to this topic, and through them I still receive letters from people looking for developers in ColdFusion - many companies inherit codebases written in this language. Sooner or later, the moment will come when they will rewrite all the code to something more modern. But for large enterprises this is a task of enormous proportions, and they will be playing for time to the maximum. Thus, a talented ColdFusion developer can still earn pretty good money as a visiting specialist. In the world of native development, I've heard similar things about COBOL and even PASCAL.
Don't forget that PHP is far more entrenched in your code than ColdFusion. In general, I am leading to the fact that in the world there will probably always be some codebases with legacy code that someone has to maintain, or even extend. Opportunities like these will be harder to find, but that doesn't mean they don't exist.
Finally
Becoming a programming elder (I like that title more than "old programmer") is sometimes a little scary. But truth be told, wisdom, to some extent, does come with age. Programmers are not of their first youth, perhaps they are not always familiar with the latest technologies, but they have rich experience in solving practical problems, which is worth its weight in gold.
Always try to keep up with the times, but do not let the fear of the future lead you into a stupor. There is no need to try and learn everything by tomorrow morning, and what you already know is still valuable. Find a balance that suits you personally and take pride in having spent so much time in the IT industry and witnessed the dawns and sunsets of so many technologies.