Am almost 53, and after 33 years in the field, I encountered a lot of ageism (at least in hiring) in the Bay Area, so I moved back to the Midwest and worked a gig for a year, then budget cuts axed the newly expanded team. As one Bay area firm said in their rejection letter )the last straw that got me to pack up:)

"You're great technically, but you're not a good cultural fit"

(Yes, I was current at the time. I know node and frontend, did two decades of JS, SQL, cloud, Java, C, rails, PHP, Perl)

Well fuck me then, because all I've done is worked in coding forever. I've managed teams but like coding much more.

I tried getting remote work, had some 20-30 interviews before COVID hit, but no gig. Haven't tried much since and that's my own fault.

So it's been two years since I worked in software. Am not working at the moment. Wouldn't say I'm happier