I’ve been solidly programming since I was a teenager, over 30 years now, in many languages, frameworks, operating systems, whatever. I have been building complex networked applications since the mid 1990s. I got tired of the constant “you must have 30 years’ experience in this four year old framework or language” filter used by hiring teams.<p>You see it here on HN often with people allegedly in hiring positions claiming that if you indeed have been in the industry for 30 years they expect you to shit diamonds and emit industrial strength code in whatever language and platform they decide is important right here, right now, on the spot. The fear of making a potential "bad hire" is so paramount that hiring managers would prefer never to fill the role than to consider maybe, just maybe, it is unrealistic to expect someone would have more years experience with a required skill than is actually possible.<p>If you are not 100% up to speed on the latest big thing you are a zero, no middle ground, no "give me a couple of days to see how the new new thing maps to last week's new thing".<p>Just tired of it. The credentialism, the sexism, the ageism, the misogyny, the thinly veiled nationalism.<p>I am not a genius, I don't have any patents. I'm a decent, solid, hard core coder. Give me a word mess of APIs and the target language or framework you want to use and I can pull together an MVP that solves your problem fairly quickly (is it production code at that moment? No, of course not, is it ready to be iterated and turned into production code? absolutely).<p>I can't get a phone screen, let alone an interview.<p>So, yeah, I am out of the software industry. I do other things that leverage what I have learned but I am not writing code, am not babysitting some system. I would not say I am happier, but I am content, and I sleep better at night than I ever did in the time I was "in the industry".