Where to Work After 40?

I have a couple ideas for you from my own experience.

There's about a bajillion C/D+ stage 100-500 person software companies in any B2B vertical you could mention who would fight hard for your type of experience. Not necessarily SaaS click-and-drool tools for corporate drones, but unique and opinionated products that have some significant engineering innovation inside. Those companies have essentially no ability to attract talent organically, anyone interested in FANG would turn up their noses, and their number one problem is quality people. In many cases the CEO/CTO leadership is incredibly strong and smart; the colleagues are happy, motivated, intelligent, and disciplined; and the work/life balance is good for the middle aged. They're vital to their customers but under continuous competitive pressure so it is far from a snoozy place to serve out time - it's a mission and a struggle every day, things change often, the pace is fast. It can be very rewarding and compensation is decent. The tradeoff is the big exit is vanishingly unlikely.

Second idea is go into consulting/professional services. Not Accenture or anything horrible like that, but dozens of boutique/smaller firms with decently inspiring leadership and a very high standard of colleague. Work is variable in interest and environment, pressures are somewhat unfairly around whether you are billable or not which is not really in your control as an engineer.

For me it was management. I was an SDE who started caring more about the users of my code than about the code itself and that led me to a team lead position and that led to management at a small company and that led to management at a big company. I found I really like mentoring junior engineers and I'm a good sounding board for senior engineers. I got to spend a lot of time saying variations on "Hey, let's not do that thing that won't work, let's do something easier that will work." I also focused a lot more on my career and making money rather than most of my life which I spent focused on cool tech and that got me to a place where I could retire easily when the time was right. Now I code for fun and I still chat with former colleagues from time to time and get to say things like "Yeah, but you know option B is the right choice so go do that." None of it was clearly planned, all of it was stressful but in the end it sort of worked out.

I don't think anybody can answer this question for you. At 40, you can still do the exact same jobs as someone who's 25 (at least in tech) if you put your heart in it. I don't know what's the expiry date for a SWE, but it's not 40.

I'm a median IC in big tech at almost 50 and don't feel discriminated against yet, and for the most part, don't feel incompetent or behind, and feel I'm having the greatest time of my career (although it's demanding). I have no issue learning the same new techs as the younger guys when I need to. I may be a bit slower but it hasn't came up as an issue so far. I also have a few colleagues older than me and they're still going strong.

As someone comin up on 50 myself, I have to say age has yet to be an issue with my career. Maybe I don't go out of my way to advertise it (cut the resume down to the past 10 or so years, don't have a face full of white hair), but I'm still landing plenty of the same ole gigs with Typescript, Ruby on Rails, Python, whatever the flavor of the month is. So I guess my advice is to just ignore it?

Of course, trying not to giggle at the 28 year old who thinks they need 4 meetings a day for their precious startup is a different matter. But as long as they pay on time...

It really depends on the type of environment and work you are looking to do.

At 59, I applied for a “full stack” (ugh..not my favorite term) job at a large Asia-based multi-national corporation working on support software (web apps) for their entertainment appliance platform. I got the job after a blessedly short interview process that did not involve any leet coding problems.

I am on an amazing senior team at a company with a great, relaxed work culture! This work is many things: fun, challenging, predictable, boring. Devs will understand how it can be all these things at once lol.

Find yourself a situation that meets your current drive/ambitions. There are a ton of places out there. Probably harder now (I got the job in 2018), but there are still people hiring.

I've been told there are two places which value experience:

1. A large organization where they have enough people with decades of knowledge to recognize what that is worth.

2. A small startup as head or lead on some domain where they need your knowledge to build their products.

It used to be that you could consult but I can tell you from direct experience with this market that it has been flooded with folks who've never consulted but neednwork, e.g. they are charging way too little. The flip side, it's a great time to hire "cheap" contract talent.

For me, reaching 50, it is all about boring enterprise consulting.

You still get to jump around technology, althought it might not be as cool, as whatever newer generations are making use of on startups, but on the other hand seniority combined with such stacks is exactly what many companies are looking for.

Naturally social skills also play a big role, as they expect people of our age to also contribute to discussions with all involved key persons, drive architecure and junior devs.

You need to lookout for opportunities where you can bring more than plain coding.

Given their classical interviews and crazy workhours, I doubt Google is really the place to retire.

> Google is the place you go to retire after 40

I don't get this honestly. About 1%-2% of devs will manage to work at a FAANG, that's it (correct me if I'm wrong). The rest of us will grind code somewhere else.

I'm 40 and I'm staying put in the startup I'm currently working for because I like the people and it's not a sweatshop. Eventually I'll find something else. I'm more worried about A.I making me irrelevant than my age.

I'm in my upper 50s and I resigned from the corporate employee world in spring of 2024. I've been working my handyman business since then. I don't have enough business to keep my schedule full (and not enough income), so I decided to get back into tech on my own terms. I've started developing a software product that I hope to launch soon. No idea how any of this will turn out, but it's the best plan I've got at the moment.

For me it was after 50, but maybe it'll apply to you. Nonprofits are desperate for knowledgeable workers. If you can afford the pay-cut the reward is worth it. From my experience:

Pros:

* The environment is more laid back.

* More people over 40 there already compared to lots of other places.

* Weirder people too, which I like.

* Smaller non-profits can't afford AI-powered HR B.S., so you can worry less about gaming them.

* Somebody of your experience and talents would be a star.

* You get to pick an industry you believe in, and maybe even influence.

* Tech is in a period of rapid change, and if you have the skills you can multiply those changes for your non-profit.

* You feel like less of a cog since many non-profits are smaller.

Cons:

* As somebody said to you, "Google is the place you go to retire after 40", I feel the same is for non-profits but more so.

* Weird politics by mission-driven people vs corporate politics which can at least almost always be attributed to money.

* It takes forever to change things.

* Shoestring budgets don't just mean lower salary, but often crappier hardware and fewer retreats and stuff. I miss big, hedonistic corporate retreats.

47 here, and I've worked for the same very small company for about 15 years, in a role where I'm the primary architect and responsible for every layer of the stack. Along the way, I've done side consulting, as much to keep fresh as for the money, primarily for similarly small companies where I usually report direct to the owner. I've been the most miserable when I find myself as a cog in a bigger wheel. The times I've dipped my toes in managing folks it's shined a spotlight on the fact that is not a competency I have.

I'm in the same situation, 41 and just folded a startup in November after six years and looking at what to do next.

My concern is if I jump on another startup and it doesn't go well, I will have even less chance to land a decent gig afterwards. Who knows what AI capabilities will be five years down the line?

I have some friends that work in government that could help me get a job there where you are basically unfireable and even get a pension, but the work is not very technically interesting. They all say it's soul-killing but stay for the stability and benefits.

Is a large tech company a better bet? I consider my self a very good developer but not sure if I can pass through all filters and the leetcode gauntlet either.

Deciding which road to go down is giving me more anxiety than ever before.

What software communities[1] are you a part of and who are you helping in those communities? Do you contribute there in the form of (code, documentation, blog posts, conference talks, helping juniors, etc)?

At 40 I think you do well to have a decent network in a focused set of communities of people you've mentored, supported, and worked with. IE folks in a specific discipline, project, thing where you might expect there to be community conferences around or other community institutions. You'd be a mainstay there, always looking to help juniors / new people, paying it forward everywhere you can, etc.

Then finding the next job is about those relationships, continuing to help them through the years, etc

Don't focus on "F-You money", focus on an "F-You network" https://softwaredoug.com/blog/2024/05/08/build-an-f-you-netw...

1 - community can mean discord/slack communities, subreddit, projects, on social media, having coffee 1-1 with people, etc etc

Tech is everywhere. You don't have to work at a "tech" company to work in tech.

Try healthcare, banking, pharma, or any other industry that has been around longer than the internet.

Many big, established companies are used to people who have worked in one place for decades. That means middle-aged people. It's not weird for them, and their experience has taught them to value experience.

Protip for anyone: When you interview for a new job, ask how many retirement parties the company had in the last five years. That will tell you a lot about the company.

I spent a long time in tech (not 40 yet but close), and my opinion is that technology creates a mechanical mindset that is sometimes a blind spot. Although it might be best for you to stay in it, I suggest testing the waters elsewhere for a bit in a more artistic area. It might be quite fun to take a break.

I am frequently in the minority here but I do believe that spending all your life in a narrow domain like technology can be restricting in the journey to figure out what life is all about.

I'm 40+ though I try not to act like it. My most recent gig, which is my favorite job to date, is working at a small startup as "The X guy", for an X I've worked on for years and years. I suspect you can similarly specialize, if you think carefully about what you did for 10 years.

If my current gig weren't an option, I'd try for some of the DoD startups where X is applicable, or I'd try to move into consulting, as others have mentioned, or I'd open my own shop for small businesses nearby, in an unrelated field. Small time one-stop consultants in my area charge more for database admin than I do for X in my PhD field.

At 60, I applied to Canonical and got hired. The hiring process is thorough but very fair, all WFH, and they generally don't care about personal attributes. Gave me 20% above my asking price and a higher starting rank than expected.

What do you care about? Money, stableness, scope or opportunities?

I know people who "settle down" in companies with well-known work-life balance (usually develop for B2B products). I know many more people who stayed at the same company and climbed the corporate ladder. I know people who jump to a different, big company for better compensation and work in different areas. I also know a small fraction of people who create their own startups -- yes, in their 40s.

It all comes to -- what do you want?

After 40, it's musical chairs. The music will stop and there won't be a chair for you. McKinsey comes in and says "cut staff." HR comes in, says "cut 5% and replace them with Desi H1-B's." Your best bet is to take a deep breath and build another start-up. In the meantime, take any job of any nature.

I'm a few years your junior but at the same time the youngest in my team. So far it seems that the 40s are the new 30s, because there's nothing notable about my coworkers being in their 40s save for their work experience.

And I can imagine why - there were quite simply too few people born in countries with a 95%+ literacy rate over the past 20 years for the usual generational turnover to occur.

Why would the strategy be any different at 40 for a software developer than any other age?

1. “Grind leetcode”

2. Study System design

3. Prepare for behavioral interviews

4. Apply for jobs that pay in the range acceptable to you.

I didn’t take my own advice at 40 and positioned myself for strategic cloud consulting + app development jobs. But that was a very narrow needle to thread. I wouldn’t suggest anyone else do it.

Besides cloud and AI are so saturated that’s really not a strategy.

I’m 50 now and spent my career until I was 40 at no name companies doing enterprise dev as mostly a “ticket taker”.

- 40 - early hire by a then new manager creating a “tiger team” at a satellite office

- 42 - first job as a lead where I oversaw integrations when the PE company was acquiring companies to get ordered to go public. My first exposure to AWS, even though I didn’t know much.

- 44 - first technical hire by a then new CTO who was tasked with bringing all development in house from a third party consulting company. I volunteered to lead all of the AWS initiatives, learned AWS and became the de facto architect

- 46 - AWS reached out to me about a remote position in the Professional Services department. I specialized in cloud architecture + app development - “application modernization”. Mid level position

- 50 - “staff software architect” at a third party consulting company

I accidentally fell into working for state government. Small state relatively and it has been one of the most enjoyable things I have ever done. I am able to help people, again, use technology to make things easier. It is very enjoyable. I can see myself working here until I am no longer able to keep up. I enjoy programming, but more importantly solving problems, and really hope that I don't have to retire.

I’m not sure about 40, but as you get older, the Federal government is a great place to work as they will allow you generous leave if you get sick, great vacation time and good benefits.

I switched from SWE to SRE in my fifties. The perception is that neckbeards take a long time to grow.

40 doesn't matter. There may be some pockets of ageism but ignore it (a rejection is always a mystery anyway). So go for what you want. You need a you-compatiable job not a 40s-compatiable job.

That said I am happy 40's person working at a 10k-100k person tech company. It turned out good so far. There is a bit more bureaucracy but happy to pay that small tax. Also you have to like microservices :)

It is very interesting. I have technically interesting work and a humble smart team.

This should be about what you want in your career now, and not about your age. Once you can clearly answer the first question, it will be easy to find the right place.

It is my understanding that if you are older than 35, have no C-suite social connections, and you lose your tech job, your tech career is over. Your only opportunities will be entry-level since none of your original education will pass automated filters, no entry-level hire is paid anything above subsistence wages, and at 35+ your rapidly-increasing medical issues (the piper's due for 20+ years of treating your body like shit pulling all-nighters 6 days a week) make living on subsistence wages an impossibility.

If your health is intact, consider yourself lucky and get the hell out before it gets worse. Find some non-tech job you can scrape out a living from and make tech your hobby instead.

If your health has already failed, well, good job making it this far, but the only things you have waiting for you in the future are losing whatever medical coverage you have, losing access to your medications, and finding out by experiment how long it will take for your conditions to become terminal when unmedicated. I don't see any reason to believe this situation will improve in the near future. It's probably time to make and/or exercise your end-of-life plans.

I'm 42 and have been working as a technical writer since I was 26. I'd argue that technical writing is one of those fields where you can comfortably work until retirement. Many in my field think AI will take their job — I think otherwise. I'm now working as a Documentation Engineer, using LLMs daily to speed up my work.

But I'm also learning Rust on the side. Guess it'll never be late for that move?

I turned 50 this year, and most of my life has been spent working in the construction industry. I started as an electrician and then transitioned to low voltage tech, primarily working with fire/security/CCTV systems. I never really believed in retirement, probably because I never got into the habit of saving money. I used to joke that my only retirement plan was to work until I was 105.

I have two daughters who came into my life much later. As I reflect on my future and the potential decline in my physical capabilities, I still consider myself in better shape than the average 50-year-old. I've always had a knack for technology, and in the 90s, I took a computer repair course when there were no computer science degrees available. However, I never embraced the office lifestyle, likely because I was young and didn't want to be confined to a desk all day.

Recently, I discovered cybersecurity and earned my certificate from Google's entry-level cybersecurity course. I found it fascinating—the idea of stopping malicious threat actors who seek to disrupt society is truly compelling. While I appreciate open-source knowledge and used it extensively in my learning, I strongly dislike those who exploit it to cause harm.

I can see myself working in cybersecurity well into my 70s, if not beyond. Despite the occasional doom and gloom, I am genuinely excited about the future of humanity. I love the idea of AI and robots assisting us in becoming better as a collective race. I understand that balance is crucial—we can't have the good without the bad—but I believe the benefits will outweigh the negatives for humanity.

I've always dreamed of a world where everyone collaborates to better humanity, rather than just focusing on individual success. This is the path I'm on now after turning 40. I wish you the best and hope this sheds some light on my journey.

Am I the only one still getting e-mails from recruiters all the time? My LinkedIn profile indicates I’m not looking for new work, and yet they still come to me in both personal and my work inbox. If I change that setting on my profile I know I’ll be absolutely inundated by them. Most of them I’m sure are non-starters, but occasionally there is one that is promising.

40+ shouldn't make it difficult for you to find work, IMHO. 50+ is where ageism starts to be a problem, no matter what your skill level. Consulting is a viable route, but even though your startup failed, I'd start a business anyway and stash as much cash as you can before you pass 50.

I've landed in a smaller non profit, the pay isn't amazing, but the benefits are, including a pension.

The main reason is it matches the feels of a start up, I have my hands in all decisions, from tech to literally office arrangement, and actively work to solve all issues in the company. That and at the end of the day, I feel good about what we are doing. I'm not chasing an IPO, our funding is very stable, so there isn't the endless dread of whats at the end of the run way.

My biggest fear, is that I don't know if I could easily go back to the rat race, and that my skills have broadened, become soft set and I don't actively develop as much as I once did.

I moved to Etsy after turning 40 (actually quite a long time after!). I’ve found it to be a really nice blend of respected work/life balance and egoless engineers working on a variety of technical paradigms at scale.

I made the move from smaller startups to progressively large companies and from IC to manager. My main motivator is to continue to find personal growth, which increasingly means learning about the human side of building software at scale. As I approach 50, a bigger pay check and more stability are of course bonuses, but I find the idea of software engineers "retiring" at 40 pretty offensive. It reeks of entitled rest-and-vest culture, and will put you in a position where companies would be right not to hire you. Instead, stay hungry, and find a place that rewards that.

I’m 50 and the offers stopped coming in 2022

I am similar demographics. In parallel to my regular job I am registering myself as self employed electrician (in Germany). For couple hours a week at the beginning and let’s see how it evolves later.

I worked as a software engineer on various unrelated products since 2007 (mostly SaaS backend and infrastructure, some desktop apps etc). I can still do it, but I have been yearning for many years now to transition to a career in research and spend some time in academia. I switched to open source freelancing last year and now I’m looking for some way to get myself into a PhD on computational biology focused on cancer immunotherapy. Would be cool to work as a research assistant for a bit before I embark on that path.

Just after hitting 40 I moved from being a dev to being a tester/QA I was working at a small company and after almost 20 years there was getting bored - the tech was changing ( from BCPL on a PDP-11 to C and .Net on Macs/PCs ) but I felt stuck in a rut and found I was better at finding bugs than writing them...

Got involved with the test community, learned a lot, got myself known and then ended up moving from the UK to Michigan just before I hit 50 to work for a small but growing s/w consultancy

I think the biggest concern for a would-be employer would be: can you take instruction. After a decade of being in-charge, that's going to be a really tough call. I'd suggest consultancy might be the easiest way to transition in to full time employment - at some point you'll find a great fit and they'll offer you a permie role.

I’d be happy to work with a small to medium company that needs customer facing help from biz dev to customer support. I’ve spent the last 17 years in advanced technology/startup first in cyber security and data privacy and the last 6 years in applied AI.

I am turning 43 and trying to figure things out as well. I am at the point in my life where the most important thing to me is not work. I just want a balanced 9 to 5 without toxicity or high demands. Is such a thing possible in this industry? If so where?

Im 44 and program 1/2 the time than when I was in my 20s but I take better decisions so I’m twice as effective. Less rewrites. Less taking risks with the hottest framework in town. My apps just work and last long without rotting

I am at Google (and have been for quite somewhat over a decade now), and am over 40 too.

Despite a lot of internal criticism about "the old Google" and how things have changed, they are still a very good company to work for in my opinion. Lots of well-known benefits, decent comp, and critically a very good work-life balance (no mandatory work-from-office so far, I probably average about 0.5 to 1 days a week in the office) and laid-back pace. I have been basically doing 8:15am to 3pm for my hours (no discussion with management about it - it's just what I do), essentially logging off at 3pm to go collect my kids and not logging back on after that (although I keep a rough eye on chat and email and jump back on if something urgent/critical comes up) and no one has batted an eye lid at all - so long as the work gets done, people are happy and are not closely monitoring where you are or how you are working. Some of the work is interesting and engaging, other part are more "meh" but I think that is true of many jobs really.

Yes I might be able to get slightly more money elsewhere (especially fintech) and might get to work on more sphincter-clenchingly-exciting work elsewhere (especially startups) but the quality of life from what is quite an easy ride of things is very valuable to me. Google is quite grown up in many ways and the culture is calm and predictable (on the whole - the recent (year or two ago) redundancies were not predicted!)

I'd recommend it.

I can tell you, that if you have technical experience and are willing to take on customer facing roles like a Sales Engineer there is no real "expiration" date as experience brings tremendous value.

Legacy app maintenance in an obscure tech stack is basically all that's out there

Iam at 41, but I learned 100X in my last 2 years than i was at working in sales for a domestic company for 10 years. Currently pursuing my passion - Startup in workplace collaboration. Moral: Age is just a Number.

Is there still age-ism in tech? Bc I see plenty of people in IC roles working into their 40s, and even some in their 50s with kids in college.

Could be the industry I work with has less age-ism: financial services.

Indie gamedev. It will feel like early day startups again. And gamedev is so special that every one in a while you switch to a new project, and that again feels fresh. But gamedev is demanding.

i'm currently without a job and i'm 40+. and i cannot find something new because every postion is instantly filled with someone better.

I just wish I could get FIRE at 40, any ideas?

I worked for 9 years at one of the large US softy companies after 40; I worked from home. Got promoted a few times, avoided doing management.

Business coaching. I'm sure you learned a lot in your startup journey. You could help others avoid the pitfalls you experienced.

I'm 59 and doing the most technical and hands-on work of my life.

When I was 40, I was a few years into my consulting gig, and that went very well for a long time (I'm a cybersecurity guy with a strong ICAM and PKI background, located in the Ottawa area, so there was plenty of work with government clients.)

But I was starting to tire of the consulting grind and found I was doing a lot of the same-old-same-old in most contracts (TRAs, PIAs, audits, etc., and, after incidents, explaining to senior management how recommendations made 6-12 months previously might have prevented or at least greatly mitigated said incident).

I was fortunate: 6ish years ago, I was winding down a couple of contracts through a friend's company and he needed someone to fill a gap and knew I had downtime, so I started a contract with him, 90+% WFH. Every few months we'd chat about where he was taking his company and about what the future product teams would need (he'd bid successfully on a pair of unrelated PoC-to-product contracts, one hardware, one software, and was looking to take things to the next level).

Long story short, 5.5 years ago I retired my shingle and returned to full time "wage slavery" (tongue firmly in cheek), almost 100% WFH. My initial role was to work with customers, fill gaps, learn fast, build fast, and move on, and our plan was to move me into a business-development-slash-product-management role, which appealed to me because of two previous contracts that had a lot of that (he'd worked on one of those and knew what I brought to the table).

You know that old saw about life being what happens when you are making other plans? Yeah, that happened :->

My title now is Director, Special Projects, but what that really means is "our customers think this is critical, no one has any idea how to do it, make it happen". It's more a senior/staff engineering position in some ways, mostly systems programming, the levels getting progressively lower (my Christmas holiday reading has been the excellent Mara Bos book on Rust Atomics).

I'm far more technical now than ever before, entirely hands-on, and it's fantastic. It helps tremendously that I work with a great team, people I've known for years, but hadn't worked directly with until now, and that our boss, my friend, understands how complex is what we are doing and how we need regular breaks and downtime; at the same time, the entire team knows how important are revenue and deadlines.

My advice, if I have any, and it all comes with a strong dose of YMMV, is two-fold:

One, it will be OK. You will be OK.

40 isn't the end, nor is 50, and I doubt 60 will be either. I'm pretty sure I'm going to spend the time around my 65th year working on ABE and data filtering in FPGAs, but that's just a guess. :->

Two, work your network.

Talk to your friends and colleagues, ask who's doing what, what the gaps are, where they think they are going, and what they might need. You have skills, others need them, do NOT under any circumstances undervalue or dismiss them.

I won't advise or even suggest consulting, because it isn't for everyone, and the kinds of contracts that, IMHO, at least, best allow you to explore the space and build a better network, are, by their nature, stressful: short term, possibly requiring travel, and sometimes spread out such that when one ends you don't know when the next will begin. But if you are OK with a certain degree of churn, uncertainty, and repetition, then it might be something to consider.

Regardless of how and where you go, remember Advice One: It will be OK, you will be OK, 40 isn't the end.

Couldn't tell you. I am 40 with no career off the ground at all. Totally screwed.

At 41, I found a local family owned company with a desire to participate in the gadget space (ie material widgets with electronics for added value) in a relatively niche market (ag automation). It’s a small group, I’m sometimes the only full time software part of the team. We’ve had some wins. At 54, I imagine I’ll retire here eventually. I’ve enjoyed a huge amount of autonomy, learned a wide range of different tech (still doing so) and am rewarded by a company that values me and invests in me (I also get to put up with the drama/dysfunction that can come in a multi-generation company in the back woods of ag).

TLDR; go find a niche that is underserved and serve it. You have the breadth to succeed as a generalist now.

Years ago I worked at an academic library where software devs over 50 felt really comfortable but people under 40 felt they were never going to be taken seriously. Part of the problem was that to get ahead and be taken seriously you had to have a library science degree but changes in the world made it seem that an applications programmer with DBA experience could be better at taxonomy, ontology and classification not to mention all the skills that were becoming essential for digital librarianship. I could take my skills anywhere, but the librarians had to carve out a place for themselves in this world.

The funniest thing was an ambitious 30-something dev who thought he was not getting taken seriously who (1) started studying for an MBA, (2) deliberately gained 30 lbs, and (3) got one of those fancy haircuts where they put aluminum foil in your hair to make grey streaks.

That organization was under a lot of stress and something popped and there was enough blame to go around including for myself and I wound up looking for a job. We have a "workforce development center" which is sometimes helpful in my town, but this time I was arguing with the councilor that I didn't think I was facing age discrimination in the way he expected.

Since then I've worked at a number of places and been the oldest person at a startup a few times. It helps that (1) I am always keeping up with new technology and (2) I've had a long term interest in things like AI and ML (and UX, VR, ...) so when an AI startup needs somebody with 5+ years of experience that's me and (3) I keep an eye on things that are timeless like the fundamental of computer science (e.g. if a Turing machine can't do it an LLM can't do it, but it might bullshit you into thinking it can... is that the real Turing test?), project management, people skills, etc.

I worked at one platoon-sized startup where I was the oldest person where I did run into a different sort of problem. Most of the employees didn't really understand or believe in the business model of the company. I believed it because I needed foundation models for the work I was doing in 2010 and knew the world would need them, but this company was a few years too early. We had frequent "all hands" meetings where I could easily upstage the CEO because I was older, could look and sound like a leader, was more enthusiastic (got this job because I'd maxxed out my HELOC chasing my own El Dorado.) Ultimately this lead to trouble.

Where to work? Same place as you did before 40.

Put the fries in the bag, bro.

Denmark or Latin America

Be good and you can work anywhere you like.

Just apply to any large companies.