I'm a little bit past 40 now. I saw the writing on the wall about ten years ago (hey, why is there like 1 programmer older than 50 in my company's engineering team of 500?) and started thinking about optimizing my career for this. I was the lead engineer for a rising product. Based on this thinking I consistently made choices that led to more engineering management rather than individual contribution work.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply technical, but I spend at least 40-50% of my time dealing with human problems, getting them to work together, resolve conflicts etc etc.

Ten years later, the results are:

- Financially: Check. I'm okay. I can kinda stop working now, if I want to. If I hadn't done that thinking a decade ago, I would not be in this financially secure position.

- Fun-wise: Meh. It was a lot more fun to build stuff than to get people to build stuff.

To be honest, I'm not sure what's the right path here.