I’m wondering if maybe I should leave the technology industry and do something else.<p>Older people I think find it harder to keep a dependable career and I’m not sure I want to continue in technology anyway.<p>But what else to do? I can’t imagine anything else that might be an effective way to make a living.<p>Any ideas?
Depending on what stage you are in life you could be a lot like me. I'm slowly but surely losing faith in a lot of things that I took for granted. I'm a computer security enthusiast and it really is depressing sometimes the direction things are going.
So...I have deleted most of my online accounts and starting to work on being more independent. I lost my internet connection for two weekends in a row and it was a little surprising how much it effected how I live at home. Yes I could used my cell phone for the essentials like email but for everything else everything I had set up was useless.
I would recommend trying to get a physical hobby where you could create something physical. It could be carpentry, blacksmithing, hunting/ fishing, etc. The point would be to get away from tech industry for short periods of time.
I think the reason a lot of older people find it harder to keep a dependable career is because their values start to change. When you are young you are willing to burn the candle at both ends to build a career and get established. When you are older you sometimes don't want to spend your entire waking day working to keep up with the Jones' or maintaining your career.
The whole ageism thing is overblown.<p>I’m in my mid 40s and I have a circle of six friends who are still developers and hands on architects. The youngest is 40 and the oldest is in his late 50s. The oldest one is our former manager who hired all of us and self demoted to a developer after his kids graduated.<p>All of us are able to change jobs like we change shoes depending on how picky we are being.<p>We don’t live in SV or on the west coast. We live in a major metropolitan area. We all aggressively keep our skills up and are careful to not get left behind the current trends:<p>- all of us (except for me) are using the latest cool kids front end frameworks.<p>- we are all developing on top of either AWS or Azure and are actually using the technologies they provide and not just hosting a bunch of VMs.<p>- we can all do Devops in a pinch.<p>- all of us are using the latest .Net Core features or Node and most of us are using Docker.<p>- We are all using a combination of SQL and NoSQL databases.<p>Etc.<p>We all have corporate jobs and won’t go near any of the cool kids work 80 hours a week at below market wages with the promise of equity startups. We have grown people bills to pay and want to get home to our families.
It helps if you have a hobby you can make a use of / that you are good at.<p>For example, carpentry, metalworking and electronics (and low-voltage electrician) are some things that interest me in my free time, and it looks like you can make a living off of them, at least in my country.
Have you considered technical work in academia? The culture's much more friendly to older people and you might prefer the type of work if you're a bit jaded by industry.
> But what else to do?<p>At the intersection of career and life purpose-- good interview here with Simon Sinek on Finding Your Why...<p>> <a href="https://www.jordanharbinger.com/simon-sinek-whats-your-why-and-where-do-you-find-it/" rel="nofollow">https://www.jordanharbinger.com/simon-sinek-whats-your-why-a...</a>