After many rejections during my job hunt last year, I did seriously consider it, yes. Despite having a pretty solid skill set and experience, no bites, which is rather demoralizing.
You can argue whether candidates in their 50s are less viable, but it was clear that age was a factor. Not just being typecast as stodgy, but also that many people simply don't want to work with, or compete against, someone who's older.
I see comments about people getting old and not wanting to learn new things, but for me it's almost the opposite. One of the things I like most about tech is learning new things, and once you've been in for several decades, there are fewer and fewer truly new things left to learn, and positions where you'd get to learn them are fewer and fewer.
It was almost a fluke, but I did finally find a job (still in tech) that works for me. But if you knew the details, it wouldn't cheer you.
I may yet leave soon, and just live out my days as a churchmouse working on Open Source projects. We'll see.
I'm only 47 but it was the same experience for me. Ended up taking a data engineer job at a local government agency - depite the lovely site (inside University of São Paulo campus) it pays 1/3 the market average.
I'm the same way; I found that the creative work that I always envisioned was not happening on the job. Now I'm at home, but I've got emacs open in another window banging out some SIMD code. Maybe I'm ahead of the curve -- everybody says vectorization is the next thing, but hardly anyone knows how to do it or how a computer works.
You can argue whether candidates in their 50s are less viable, but it was clear that age was a factor. Not just being typecast as stodgy, but also that many people simply don't want to work with, or compete against, someone who's older.
I see comments about people getting old and not wanting to learn new things, but for me it's almost the opposite. One of the things I like most about tech is learning new things, and once you've been in for several decades, there are fewer and fewer truly new things left to learn, and positions where you'd get to learn them are fewer and fewer.
It was almost a fluke, but I did finally find a job (still in tech) that works for me. But if you knew the details, it wouldn't cheer you.
I may yet leave soon, and just live out my days as a churchmouse working on Open Source projects. We'll see.