In in my mid 40s, went through some life burnout due to trying to start my own business, and had to come back to just being the most solid engineer I can be.
I do contracts almost exclusively because I have no faith in the employment market as an employee given the current trends in hiring.
Also I dont feel that being an employee makes me more of a team player, In most places contractors are doing the real work and employees are sitting around chatting over the water cooler. Id rather get work done.
Im a generalist and in spite of the rather idiotic statements about that in the first comment, its really the only way to go, if you are not a generalist you are likely not employable regardless of your age. Any shop that has hordes of 20 year olds spitting out HTML/CSS is wasting their time.
The beauty of being a generalist is that once you have enough experience and a core set of tools, you can add new ones or not at your leisure. The pace of things is really not that fast, about 80% of all tools that get released are just junk that noone will remember in a couple years.
One benefit of being an older developer, is that in a decent shop people tend to notch down the bullshit factor, because they know you have heard it before.
Conning people into doing things that are stupid is reserved for the 20 somethings.
I do contracts almost exclusively because I have no faith in the employment market as an employee given the current trends in hiring.
Also I dont feel that being an employee makes me more of a team player, In most places contractors are doing the real work and employees are sitting around chatting over the water cooler. Id rather get work done.
Im a generalist and in spite of the rather idiotic statements about that in the first comment, its really the only way to go, if you are not a generalist you are likely not employable regardless of your age. Any shop that has hordes of 20 year olds spitting out HTML/CSS is wasting their time.
The beauty of being a generalist is that once you have enough experience and a core set of tools, you can add new ones or not at your leisure. The pace of things is really not that fast, about 80% of all tools that get released are just junk that noone will remember in a couple years.
One benefit of being an older developer, is that in a decent shop people tend to notch down the bullshit factor, because they know you have heard it before.
Conning people into doing things that are stupid is reserved for the 20 somethings.