I’m near 50, have a tech sales job, and have been constantly miserable for the past year and a half, to the point where I’m a doctor appointment short of being officially clinically depressed. A decade ago I was an engineering director at a local company (I’m in Europe), but left due to an acquisition and joined a major tech company for a pre-sales gig that pays well, but has become a major source of frustration due to the company’s money-grabbing ethos.<p>I have deep systems, networking and hardware expertise, deal with cloud services on a daily basis, have a live (weekly updated) GitHub profile with the stuff I still build, know my way around data pipelines, etc.<p>Every time I interview at a startup for a tech leadership role (and I’ve gone in several times, after jumping through various kinds of hoops/evals/screenings) I’m cast as “too corporate” as soon as they lay eyes on me on an age/background basis alone, and it’s been driving me insane.<p>I want to go back to Engineering and am willing to take a pay cut so that I can actually help people build stuff again rather than bleed out in meetings, and I just can’t figure out how.