As someone who was in their late 40s when the dotcom bust started biting in 2001/2002 I have been down this road. I initially gave in to mid life crisis mode tr

As someone who was in their late 40s when the dotcom bust started biting in 2001/2002 I have been down this road. I initially gave in to mid life crisis mode trying to switch to running my own business instead of working as a programmer. It was fun for a while but almost always ran just a few steps above the brink of disaster. Eventually I picked a new technology to learn and become expert in (ExtJS in my case) that got me first contract then full time employment around 2007. I'm never going to work for Google either, but there are still plenty of lower rungs on the programming ladder.