I am 52 and have been programming for just short of 40 years. I started in high school, and that was WAY before high schoolers were doing programming. I have spent most of my life/career on mainframes, gradually moving over to MS (VB, VB.NET, C#, etc.) starting about 4-5 years ago, partly because of learning something new, partly because I was pretty sure there weren't going to be any more jobs in the mainframe arena. I do have a lot of enthusiasm - the reason why I was hired where I am now - not for what I knew or did, but because I was willing to learn and tackle a miriad of projects. The biggest problem IS my age - all the people are hiring are younger than my children; and I KNOW that for a number of openings, it was blatant age discrimination. Also, w/ the youngsters, there seems to be a big thing about terminology - though I had worked w/ SQL, I couldn't remember the formal definition of Inner vs. Outer join - and that was the reason I was given as not being hired. So, stick in there - you're right, it IS in our genes - but expect to be discriminated against, laughed at, and ignored.