The new Boomers

Baby boomers occupied knowledge work positions longer than any generation before them. Unlike factory workers who retired from physical labor, knowledge workers just stayed. Programming doesn’t wear out your knees.

Now the last boomers are stepping down. Someone has to fill those positions.

That someone is probably in their late thirties. Two decades of experience. You’ve seen frameworks come and go. You remember when JavaScript was a toy language.

But you might not need to follow the traditional path.

The old model was predictable. Get experience. Move to management. Trade your keyboard for spreadsheets and slides.

AI development tools will change that equation.

Why manage a team of five junior developers when you can have the productivity of fifteen?

You know what good code looks like. You understand system architecture. You’ve debugged enough production fires to spot problems before they happen. Now you have tools that amplify that experience instead of bureaucratizing it.

Junior developers will learn AI-assisted coding as their baseline. But they lack the pattern recognition that comes from years of mistakes. They don’t know which shortcuts lead to technical debt disasters.

You do.

Combined with AI tools, that experience becomes a superpower. This creates a new archetype: the experienced individual contributor who skips management entirely and becomes a one-person product factory.

Here’s the thing though: they might not be in a hurry to leave either. Why retire when you can outproduce entire teams? Why step aside when you’re finally having fun building again?

Sound familiar?

Meet the new boomers.