The Graduate "One Word: Plastics"

I deleted my rather cynical post, about how we can "age out" of frontline programming, and will replace it with this rather sunnier treatise: Open source work. I was a manager for over 25 years. I'm a really good manager. I could probably be an ideal CTO. But I don't love it. I love writing code. As my management track progressed, I found my technical work deprecating. It did teach me to be a lot more "strategic," and "architectural" in my approach, but I found that I was sitting down and banging out code less and less. To make things worse, I kept reading about how the tools and techniques were progressing to levels far beyond what I had learned. I didn't have a "shower clause" in my employment contract (where the employer insists that they own the ideas that you come up with in the shower before work), so I was free to write software in an extracurricular manner, as long as I didn't use employer time and/or resources to do so. So I started to do open source. In the beginning (about 25 years ago), there wasn't a good infrastructure for shared configuration management, so most of the work I did was published "after the fact" (otherwise known as "deliverable"). I would make the source available, "on the side." Nowadays, with things like GitHub, GitLab and BitBucket, you can actually run a distributed collaborative open-source (or closed-source) project, with the process open. It also works great for single-engineer projects. The result, these days, is that I have a GIGANTIC po