I'm 52 was a professional programmer for 20 years and an SWE 10 of them, up until this year and was glad to get out. Over time I wound up carrying more and more responsibilities, I was a team lead and owned bigger and bigger projects so I was getting tired from the constant pressure which made coding harder. I changed jobs. I'm at Apple doing internal developer support for an internal API. Work's easier, still get a SWE salary, and the new job's actually pretty fun. Worth seeing what kinds of other opportunities are out there, you don't have to be a code-monkey forever.
But that's like the best job available in all of this.
Code monkey might be bad, but everything else is worse. I can't think of anything else, maybe there's something, but for a job easily attainable by someone with no connections whatsoever code monkey is pretty damn good.
