I think that in 50 years time we'll see 80 year olds in software engineering. With the terrible economy that millennials have faced their entire adult lives, a lot of us will never retire.

Moreover with the slowing of Moore's law, I think it'll be reasonable to keep up-to-date. Experience with 33Hz punch-card machines is not very transferrable to modern systems, but I'm willing to bet that in 50 years desktop CPUs will be in the same order of magnitude, and we'll be using keyboard + monitor.

Anecodotal evidence: As a 19 year old I learnt programming on a 20 year old VBA program built by an IBM punch-card veteran, and was mentored by a scientist with a similar background who could not fathom what classes are.

I would expect in 50 years virtual reality will be indistinguishable from real world, which can make remote team work actually efficient, unlike current state. This has to enhance SW development in unimaginable ways. I still expect to use (virtual) keyboard and some form of 3d mouse. I can imagine multithreaded debugging made much easier.

But yeah code will still be code, on similar platforms, don't expect anything radical compared to VMs of these days. Probably.

Out of curiosity, what was your first act and what made you transition to software engineering?

Bioengineering in academia. Moved to software engineering for an extra $100,000/year. In hindsight, my overall my standard of living has gone down despite the extra money due the housing crunch in the Bay Area.