Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is that....weird? My coworker has worked here for 25 years now, and he's still "just" a programmer, was never interested in taking a managerial/lead position. There's plenty of programmers who have 10~20 years of seniority here. And it's a games company, so it's not like these people work on some archaic systems - major, triple A releases everyone heard about.
At my company anyone here less than 10 years is a newbie. You're not an old timer until you reach 30 years, and a few grandees make it to 50. It's a big old company though (one of the oldest in the field), and this is in broadcast engineering which is far more conservative. IME Peoppe in the Internet facing parts are far more flitty. While some older engineers are happy to retreat into comfortably old technologies li…
Technically, he's worked for several different companies. For a while he was working for a different company, but doing exactly the same work, with the same people, in the same building.
I don't think it will be easy to replace network engineers like him, who have been doing the job literally as long as the consumer internet has existed.