I'm 58. During my career, I have worked with PDP-11 assembly language, 68000 assembly, FORTRAN and PL/I on VAX/VMS, x86 assembly and C on MS-DOS, "C with Objects" and later C++ on Classic Mac, C++ and Java on Windows, server-side Java for a short time, Curl, client-side Java, Objective-C/C++ on MacOS and iOS, and I'm currently doing cross-platform Qt development while I spin up a new phase of my career doing independent and/or contract iOS development.

The thing that saved my career was the personal computer, which allowed me to develop new skills at home on my own time. A lot of my Java training was self-driven, and I am completely self-taught on Objective-C and Cocoa.

At 40, I wouldn't hesitate to go back to school for formal training if I could find an appropriate program, but until then, pick something that looks like fun (in my case, it's iOS development), pick a project that's fun enough to motivate you (even if it'll never get marketed, or even "finished"), and dig in.

If you don't find software development fun or motivating, find something else that is. On this anniversary of Steve Job's death, remember that life is too short to do something that doesn't motivate you.

Good luck!

These are the important secrets?

It's more likely that Apple's competitors are going to look at this thin slice of evidence and apply it badly, as has been done so frequently in the past.

I'm more worried about Apple drifting away from its own successful values than I am about somebody else "discovering" them on the basis of this trial's discovery.

Excellent point! It reminds me of something I noticed among my fellow CS students in the 70's: If someone hated debugging, they would drop out of CS within a year or two; if they enjoyed, it, they thrived. I think there are corollaries that hold true in the present: a willingness to dig into intractable problems (as opposed to complaining about the tools) is a marker for longevity.

Agreed.

I started software development at 22 and I'm turning 58 next month; I've spent a grand total of about 12 months out of work due to layoffs. I haven't been back to school since I got my master's in CS in '87; everything I've learned since has been on the job or on my own time. It's not that hard.

Frankly, it is more difficult to land a new position when competing with younger workers who are freshly trained in current technologies, and who don't have family obligations eroding their work days, but I still bring something to the table, most especially experience that helps prevent making old mistakes new again. At least twice in the last few years, my past experience with assembly helped me resolve issues that had my co-workers scratching their heads even after I explained it to them.

Current expertise: Objective-C (OS X and iOS), C++, and picking up Qt and Ruby. Java is getting a little rusty now. My skills and the language. ;-)

It does help that I love what I do.

A couple of thoughts:

If my wife is any indication, tablets (the natural target of the e-texts) will be embraced much more enthusiastically than computers. Although she is considered a technology early adopter in her school, she struggles with what we /.ers would consider rudimentary use of our iMac at home. In contrast, she and some of her colleagues are totally caught up with their iPads.

Our local system is already shifting its technology strategy toward tablets, assuming they can get the town to approve the funding this year.

Your question anticipated this, but, yes, a key benefit of e-texts is that they can be loaded onto readers and aren't reliant on internet access. Internet access at my wife's school is unreliable; part of the problem is an infrastructure problem, but managing a system-wide network with almost no IT staff is a problem in and of itself. Pre-loaded content is essential.

My wife is a first grade teacher in the school system I and my children attended. (I graduated high school in 1972, so technology had a whole new meaning back then.) I have volunteered for many technology-related projects, including a committee overseeing a complete overhaul/rebuild of the schools, so I have some first-hand experience with this.

There was a big national (sorry, U.S.) initiative in the 90's to get every classroom connected to the Internet. I participated in several "Net Days", or something like that, where we volunteers ran Cat5 through ceilings and musty basements and punched down net drops In every classroom of every school in our town.

After that initiative, finding net-capable computers to hook up was a problem (two of my wife's four classroom computers were formerly our home Macs); most school systems are stretching their budgets to put teachers (and mandated special Ed aides) in the classrooms and keep textbooks current; technology is a luxury few systems can afford.

Don't even get me started on staffing to maintain systems and networks. Most school systems get by with less than a tenth of what a comparable sized company would expect to have in place for IT support.

As someone pointed out earlier, there was a time not that long ago where you could not assume every home had a computer with decent access to the Internet, and you could not make it the primary means of communication without excluding too many people.

For a while, my wife paid out her (our) own pocket to maintain a web presence.

Things are improving; our town is using a system called X2 for web presence, report cards, communication, etc. But refer back to the support staffing issues. There is no real support; the system is maintained and updated by marginally technical personnel for whom this is a secondary responsibility (after, say, actually teaching), for a miserly stipend that works out to less than minimum wage if calculated by the hour.

I know some people who wish schools did a better job at this would be willing to spend the extra tax dollars to support it, but you'd be amazed at how many want more for less.

I've actually been writing software since getting a BS in CompSci in '76 (and updating it with an MS in '87): assembler (PDP-11 and some early microprocessors), FORTRAN, PL/I, 8086 assembler on MS-DOS, C/C++ on classic Mac & Windows, Java, and now Objective-C on MacOS and iOS, and finally experienced an IPO for the first time. I went down the management path for a while, but I like coding so much I do it as a hobby, so I'm really getting paid to do something I enjoy. I can't imagine working at anything else and maintaining my enthusiasm at it.

I now have co-workers younger than my kids. If I retire any time soon, it will probably be into independent development.