I'm 52, and work is in a neat little compartment. It's not great, but it's not soul sucking, and has good PTO and a pension and financially everything's grand and on-track...but work and my career is no longer where I draw value. I could easily see finishing my career here, and I could also see having another job before retirement.
(And, I could see retiring ASAFP if I could get the financial and life expense curves to cross. :) )
It's coming along great. Been at it for about a year and a half (over two years, if you count the backend I wrote -over ten, if you count the geographic DB, which I also wrote).
Building useful software for an ngo that works in poor African countries and wouldn’t be able to afford an engineering team is what I want to do, not binge watch Netflix from my sofa.
NGO I mentioned: https://mindleaps.org
Cool! Looks like work that feeds the soul.
Recruiters tended to "ghost" me, almost immediately upon finding out my age.
It was weird. I have a tremendous résumé, and they would contact me, gushing about it, then would suddenly have a "connection issue," after I told them my age.
I'd never hear from them again. I guess the industry is crawling with 30-year-olds, with 35 years of experience.
It's quite possible to get work. All of my employees got jobs again, but it took a couple of years, for a couple of them to find settled work. Most had to be contractor employees for a year or so. Our team was composed of very experienced C++ programmers. Absolutely top-shelf engineers.
They're doing fine, now, but it took a while. I just didn't feel like going through the agita.
Not sure I'd recommend that. It probably comes across as "challenging." I just got tired of having my time wasted.
I wish you the very best of luck.