I work for an unsexy BU. We have slightly declining revenues, but on a high level. Development is in full swing and I feel save. The longer I stay the more obsolete my resume will look. Anyone interested in a C coder?
On the opposite, there are a lot of Cisco products based on industry buzzwords. Nobody wants to buy these products from Cisco. Those who work there need to worry about their future. Their resumes are full of cool buzzwords and it should not be that difficult finding another job.
If you are in the right place at the right time, you can be a grey hair at a very cushy job.
If you own some God-awful complicated piece of code (scripts/build processes that no one understands or have little time and patience to reverse engineer), you could rule and collect a fat paycheck. Is this the institutional knowledge/domain knowledge you were inquiring about? You have to be more a politician and less an engineer to get there. The majority of grey hair I have seen are in this category.
You also suffer from observational bias. For every 1 grey hair you see around, you won't see the 10 others who were let go.
The bitter truth about software engineering is that the best software engineer would make himself/herself redundant from a specific domain. A lot of times, this happens (to the entire field taken in aggregation; the newest open source development focussed on automation tells us that).
Unless you are learning constantly, you always face the danger to be obsoleted. Unfortunately, the human brain slows down...and 40 seems to be that magic biological cutoff number. You think the corporate fatcats don't know this? Not only you are slow at learning, you need far more salary and more time off to attend to those pesky people you call children and spouse at home. Please!!!!!
These are some bitter pills I have swallowed as I approached near 40 as a software engineer. I have always moved aggressively (Cisco was a short-gap stop to me and unfortunately, I got stuck at babying legacy code...a couple of years wasted in my life, but I enjoyed the paycheck). I have saved like crazy, am near paying off my mortgage already and have been maxing out my retirement. Who knows? I might actually welcome an LR at 45+.
learn COBOL
Approaching 40, does that mean once you hit 40+ you are done? Nobody will hire you? I wonder why I see all those gray hair in senior positions everywhere and not 20 some young blood ... am I missing something here? Wisdom that you gain with years of experience has no value?
I had the very same safe C programming done in 1990s code base and styles (right down to very obsolete ways of writing Makefiles). We had a similar situation though - our product was doing OK and there was a lot of development going on (although 50% of the work was fixing absolutely nonsense segfault bugs).
You know what - I quit.
In the last 8 months, I have learned SO MUCH stuff...my breadth of software engineering has increased 10 times if not less. I was very fortunate to be offered that role in a senior position and given an opportunity to LEARN. I am approaching 40 now, and there wouldn't have been another opportunity.
Now, I am a full stack developer and am at the cutting edge of the latest technology. And it's not just a bunch of cool buzz words - it's stuff that's logical, makes life easy, makes Agile a real game changer and brings you closer to the customers. Yes, our product is nowhere close to selling as much as Cisco does (we actually compete with Cisco in a way), but we are catching up.
Personally for me, plenty of avenues have opened up. I will next go into product management now having played with and understood the technology.
My advice - do not get stuck and rely on your product being profitable always. MOVE while there is time. It will be hard initially, but that's a pill you need to swallow for your long term health.
I agree, never trust Cisco (that's means don't trust the mgmt!) tomorrow you'll hear the earning call and they'll feed you a lot of BS. Back to your skills dilemma, since you know C it will be very easy for you to learn GO or Python! Get that and you'll be OK.
I would go with an opportunity that gives me cool buzz words for my resume. One day your safe "C" coding job will be obsolete too then what will you do? Never trust Cisco; nobody is ever safe in that company.