Ask HN: Surviving a Mid-Career Crisis

I’m nominally a senior engineer with a BS CS. I spent the majority of my career at a FAANG, doing what most people would consider “low-impact” work. No fancy algorithms or large-scale services, just frontend work, mid-level design, and building dev tooling. Generally high performance reviews and I enjoyed mentoring junior programmers and collaborating with stakeholders. I left after the pandemic because I was exhausted and floundering, and my mental health had bottomed out.

I’ve spent a few years doing no salaried work other than a <year stint at a company where some serious mismanagement led to me cutting my losses. It’s been a year since I’ve worked, but I’ve kept myself learning with trying new languages, implementing things like transpilers, task schedulers, and tooling for personal monorepos, picking up Rust, playing with coroutines in C++, doing code health for small open source projects, and practicing Leetcode.

I’m now in my mid-30s, 15 years into my career. I’ve started my job search and, not even a few weeks in, I’m starting to see the problems:

1. My resume has a lot of things on it, but not the sort of impact people seem to want demonstrated (hard numbers like scaling a service to X00,000 users or improving latency on critical services by Xms in the 99th percentile).

2. I’ve always preferred to be a generalist, despite the stigma, because I’ve always felt specialization to be a risk in a field with constantly emerging new technologies, and because I’ve never had the temperament or confidence to build sophisticated expert experience on my knowledge base. I’ve never had the confidence to look at a coding exercise and say, “yeah, I can do that”, _despite having a degree in CS and working for a high-profile company for almost a decade_.

3. Jobs want experience in e.g. specific cloud services, or JavaScript frameworks, or CI tools; things that would be “third-party” inside my previous FAANG that I have no experience with.

4. The very fact that I’ve taken so much time off, despite working on and executing large personal projects, seems to turn hirers off. I don’t regret the “sabbatical” and I’ve written tens of thousands of lines of code and even projects that needed someone with algorithms experience to pull off, like maximal squares, but that doesn’t interest hiring teams.

On top of that:

1. The job market is a bloodbath, with layoffs dot fyi claiming 1113 tech companies laid off 249,354 employees in 2023 alone, and 164,969 employees in 2022. Obviously not necessarily all engineers, but you can see how I might fear being inadequate compared with some of the best performers from the best companies.

2. I’m terrified about AI becoming the standard for jobs like mine, precisely because I am not an industry-level or subject-matter expert in any specific IT field. I seem to be precisely the person targeted by the use of AI to facilitate software development.

Do I drop out of the field entirely? Settle on low-paid consultant work and become another software plumber hoping my clients never decide to just turn to AI instead? Try and tighten up my resume and give recruiters what they want to hear? I’ve always considered the “put everything you’ve ever worked on on your resume” to be a form of deception; I worked on Android development in 2015, but that doesn’t make me an Android programmer or even suggest those skills are useful (pre-Kotlin, pre-who knows how many API levels, etc).

EDIT: Also if it helps I'm in NYC; the job market here is extremely hot and filled with high performers and experts.