As someone also in my 40s I can relate to this tendency. I am not an amazing developer by any standard and I tend to under value my skillset. Ive seen people wh

As someone also in my 40s I can relate to this tendency. I am not an amazing developer by any standard and I tend to under value my skillset. Ive seen people who are 10x engineers and I can say for certain that I am not that. I do think, however that there are niches and bits and pieces of info that I understand well and the average or even above average engineer may not know these things. I recently had an experience at a client site where they had a pretty complex, very fragile system that was built over the course of decades and they had entrenched developers that understood it well. I struggled to catch up and made a few errors that looked bad at the surface, but honestly were not something that is unexpected when you have a fragile system with tons of dependencies. That said it shook my confidence quite a bit and made me re-evaluate where I was in my abilities. I wondered if I was "done" programming or that I was going to end up in a bunch of less well paying jobs and be marginalized. Then I went somewhere else where I had some success, and it made me realize, it wasn't me, it was them. I wasnt a fit there, and that is ok. It sounds to me that you may need to evaluate what your strengths are and see if you can find something closer to those strengths. Software is a very broad subject. There are a million ways to code and build applications. There will always be some place that needs your skillset, and it may not seem glamorous or fantastic, but you may actually be happy at the right shop. That said I would be happy to discuss what you know/want to do and exchange ideas. Email is in my profile...