What about retirement savings? If you had funded your 401(k) and IRAs with an engineer's salary for this many years you should have many millions to live off of.

> What about retirement savings? If you had funded your 401(k) and IRAs with an engineer's salary for this many years you should have many millions to live off of.

Retiring to millions may be true in theory for certain programmers, but certainly not true for all programmers.

Reality is often different for everyone. As the African proverb says: “all fingers are not equal” meaning the outcome of a specific situation can differ across people. For instance, what if s/he had a financially draining medical emergency, forcing them to rejoin the workforce?

>If you had funded your 401(k) and IRAs with an engineer's salary for this many years you should have many millions to live off of.

And then what? Believe it or not, some people consider programming a blessing and fun. If it keeps you engaged, why not continue to get paid for it?

Many people suffer various setbacks in life ... take medical bankruptcy for example. You never know how it will turn out.

Yes. imagine if you retired you could turn to programming full time just for fun!

Thats my goal. All of the programming I enjoy doing has no clear way to monetize.

I'd love to spend months reverse engineering proprietary electronics and writing open source code / datasheets for them.

End of the day, passion & some objective in life - is more valuable than few dollars we earn. This is more useful in old age than ever.