I am 67, and equestria is mostly correct. I still get great satisfaction from my tech career, but sure, friends and family matter more. This story involves some work I did that did not bring me satisfaction.

I worked at my first consumer-oriented tech company, right after the dotcom crash. It was a really unexciting interlude in my career. I was given the job of writing the database and Java representation of credit/debit cards, and the related business logic. As often happens, the code grew over time, as requirements and card types were added. And it was finally time for a rewrite, and this code became a poster child for technical debt.

Startup activity resumed, and I left for a far more interesting startup.

Then, maybe 15 years later, I was retired, and doing consulting, and ran into a friend from the company, who told me that a new company doing something very similar, and was looking for help. I go in and talk to them, and discover that they actually licensed the software from my former company. Including my long-in-the-tooth credit/debit/xyz-card software. The code was still completely recognizable, disturbingly so. It lived on far past the point that it should have.

I decided to not take the consulting job. I really did not relish the idea of going back to this very forgettable and uninteresting code. But most importantly, I had just retired, and wanted to spend my summer on a lake, not keeping this code alive a bit longer.