You should have stopped at the 50th application without response, and asked for professional help. As the saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the

You should have stopped at the 50th application without response, and asked for professional help. As the saying goes, "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result." A career coach could have helped you figure out what was wrong. Without knowing the details, I'd guess that the age prejudice is in your head, and instead your resume just raised a bunch flags. One common mistake is listing several disparate skills, with no coherence; recruiters need to be able to categorize you in one of their "boxes" - SRE, engineer, Unix sysadmin, Windows sysadmin, security analyst, leader CTO-type, etc. Jack-of-all-trades are usually the first ones to be dismissed. Other common flag is lack of consistency in your trajectory. Candidates jumping between jobs too quickly may be a problem, unless you're looking for a short-term contractor. Also, after you've been out of the market for a couple of years, it gets harder to get back in. So it's natural that now you're having to turn down offers. Again, another proof that age had nothing to do with your low success rate.