“I’m going to ride the biggest wave I can to get as far up the ladder as I can before I get to that “middle age” where the younger prospects can outperform me.”
Friend, if you are doing the same work as younger prospects by the time you are “middle aged” you are doing it wrong, or you have the wrong job now.
I’m 35 now and finally feel like I’m being noticed for what I do. I am on the cusp of being promoted into an IT architect role which is the top of the tallest mountain I figured I’d climb in my career. The thing with climbing those mountains, there are always higher ones just within view from the top.
I am starting to see younger prospects (<25) come into Tier III-level engineering, but many of them lack motivation or discipline. They only want to work on the exclusive projects using the big toys and don’t want to work in the trenches on things like work orders and paperwork for change control. Then they often despise people like me despite over 20 years of applied, practical IT knowledge and 9 years of undergraduate and graduate work. Oh, and not to mention over 3 years of coursework and preparation for certifications in networking, operating systems, and security.
I’ll work for as long as I can, and yes, I completely understand that I’m working to make someone else money; but I genuinely and truly LOVE what I do. I love everything about what I do to the point that my hobbies revolve around it. My wife thinks I’m crazy, but I honestly couldn’t think of a job I’d rather be doing.