Being a borderline old fart, this caught my eye.

PBS | I, Cringely . October 27, 2005 - Changing the Guard: "In the U.S. the Baby Boom generation includes anyone born from 1946-64, which means everyone 41-59 years old. Those ages generally cover the top technical management positions in most companies and universities and they are starting to retire. But as anyone who reads magazines knows, this generation of upcoming retirees acts younger and healthier than the generations that preceded it and they plan to have very active older years. At the urging of reader Joel Franusic, I've been thinking of what implications this has for Open Source software.

Cringely continues:

The implications are huge. Imagine 100,000 engineers and programmers leaving the U.S. work force every year for the next 18 years, because that's what is going to happen. Some of those people will find other careers, but most of them will be motivated less by money than they were earlier in their lives. Most of them will want to remain active. And once a nerd always a nerd, so I think many of them will gravitate to Open Source.

What kind of programmers, what kinds of skills will be entering this arena?

We've had such generational changes before in software, but the last time it happened the people retiring were nearly all COBOL programmers. I don't see many COBOL projects on SourceForge. Those were people programming mainframes without a thought to user interfaces or even to users. Their skill sets did not translate well to smaller computers so when they retired they RETIRED. But this new generation of retirees started with Pascal, quickly transferred to C, and has been doing object-oriented programming or program management for at least the last decade. Even the retiring Visual Basic programmers, of which there are literally millions, have skill sets that easily transfer into the projects being developed today. So we're likely to have an influx of talent into Open Source projects, supplanting the mid-20s geeks that have been pushing that business. Yes, they are retired and therefore not inclined to stay up all night, but maybe they don't need to stay up all night, either. There's something to be said for wisdom. [snip]

I envision this influx of new-old talent, which will have serious impact on how these projects are managed, most of that positive. I can imagine that these somewhat grayer projects will have more involvement in published standards, and we'll see more activity at places like the IETF, which is all good. And the result is likely to be more competition for shrink-wrapped software. This trend will make life harder, not easier, for Microsoft."

Since I'm doing something like this myself (or at least contemplating it), it's pretty easy to envision tens of thousands of others like me doing exactly the same thing. What kind of cumulative impact will this "megatrend" have on the software development landscape?

Link