I’ve spent a few years doing no salaried work other than a 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.
I've been coding since I was 8 years old, and professionally for a couple decades. Late 30s here and feeling pretty burnt out too, especially with the current market.
I think the bigger lesson here is that we're just as disposable as any other trained monkey, and the market is correcting itself for the overhyped advertising bubbles of the last few years, especially covid. There's nothing that special about what we do, and we were just temporarily overpaid in an era of irresponsible easy capital, with lots of detrimental social impacts. It was bound to crash at some point.
Still, there will always be companies chasing the latest fads on investor dollars, but if you're not the latest and greatest, they probably don't want you. I've been able to find reasonable employment in the long tail of "other" companies, ones who need mediocre low level dev work and pay livable wages (but nowhere near FANG level). Would you be happy in such an org, getting by without getting rich or really leaving a mark on anything in particular? Yes, you'd be just settling, but still better off than most of the 8 billion people on this planet. Is that enough?
If not, hell, if you have the savings... why not use this time to do a PROPER midlife crisis and reevaluate what you want out of your life? Who cares what algorithms you know and what percentile performance you eeked out of some service that's going to be forgotten in ten years? None of that matters. Your family won't care, your friends will come and go, most of these companies will either be gone or become boring monopolies. Instead of leetcode, maybe some soul searching?
I'm job searching right now and while it's not where near as res hot as before, I'm having no problem gettinf interviews. I just have some requirements that make me a bad fit for a lot of companies like I must be remote.
I'd say look at what you've done and figure out what your specialty is and sell that. There's more to specialties than tech stack.
It sounds like you (now) have a pretty good picture of the landscape, and where you fit into it. I think it mostly depends on what you want to do long term... if you goal is just to get a day job and pay the bills, then you're probably on the right track, just grind leetcode and market yourself well and you'll get something.
If your goal is to have a satisfying career, it's less clear that you'll be able to find that, and maybe it's worth considering some other options. I'm also in NYC actually and still trying to figure this stuff out myself!