Anything, really (well, aside from areas requiring additional formal education and/or expensive in time and/or money credentials; this not a path to becoming a doctor, lawyer, scientist, etc.). There's very basic "work skills" that any job requires, e.g. showing up; the object here is to get a "real", career type of job before, say, a couple of years have passed unemployed, after which I've read its very very hard to get such a job.
I would also imagine it's easier to transition to something else desirable from a programming job compared to retail (which isn't doing well anyway), food service, etc., jobs which many of us are mentally/temperamentally unsuited.
When I read/skimmed it, What Color is Your Parachute?(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Color_is_Your_Parachute%3...) spent a lot of ink on this. And as has been noted by many, most Americans change careers several times, it's definitely not out of the ordinary.
That sounds like an awful waste of 20 years' worth of skills and experience. I never saw this "check out at 35-40 and do something else" advice given in other specialized and relevant professions, but I can see how it may fit in the context of a jobs bubble where the industry can't sustain all the gold-rushers for their entire working life.
"That sounds like an awful waste of 20 years' worth of skills and experience."
Indeed. But then again, what can you say about a field where "senior" is commonly added to titles after 5 or so years?
If you're a programmer in the US and below the age of 40, I sincerely hope you investigate this before you find yourself only able to get consulting work. Or perhaps embedded, there are those who respect grey hairs in that field. Or government work; that's likely to be only attractive if you get a job requiring a serious security clearance, e.g. TS/SCI or Q, from an organization that's willing to have to mark time or whatever while you get it, then of course stay in jobs requiring a high clearance.
But this has been going on since at least the '90s, it has nothing to do with jobs bubbles, heck, it was strong at the height of the dot.com bubble, when I had my personal epiphany on it (was 35 in 1996), it's age discrimination. Or partly wage discrimination, young people, and/or those on H-1B and L-1 visas are cheaper, more malleable, etc. Google has provided one of the more notorious examples, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Reid_(computer_scientist...
