The above comment is dead on. Outside of a few bastions such as IBM there are few places for a programming career past the age of 40. AT&T Bell Labs (and Lucent) used to allow working as a programmer until retirement, but those positions have dwindled.
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logcheck, when tuned to match your system, does a nice job of reporting unusual log entries amidst all the normal cruft.
Norm Matloff has written about this in the context of H-1B visas. See Problems and Needed Reform for the H-1B and L-1 Work Visas and Debunking the Myth of a Desperate Software Labor Shortage.