Introduction to Computer Science, IDC Herzliya

It depends, mainly, on your professional interests. In principle, you can stay in programming as long as you like. But typically, people write programs until they are around thirty years old. At this point the brain normally begins to deteriorate so people move on to become managers. Therefore, 3-5 years after graduation, people with CS degrees find themselves doing numerous different things: design, user-interface, marketing, training, product management, general management, and so on. For example, here is an interesting story about Marissa Mayer, a Google executive (with a CS degree from Stanford) whose work is to look after Google's "look and feel". Her current job has little to do with programming, but before she got it she was a programmer for several years. -- Shimon