Story: The Aging Programmer

Kate Gregory has been writing C++ for over forty years. Books, keynotes, a consulting firm she built from the ground up. At sixty-three, she's one of the most experienced programmers alive.

She surveyed hundreds of software engineers about getting older. What scares you? What's changed? What have you lost? The things people feared most — memory, stamina, keeping up — weren't the real threats. The stuff that was actually breaking down was mostly fixable. A bad knee wasn't aging, it was a torn cartilage. Wrist pain disappeared when she changed how she slept.

But buried in the research was something harder to fix. The single factor that predicted whether you'd age well or badly had nothing to do with your body at all.

The opponent isn't aging. The opponent is the story about aging.

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