I was told by my mom that people change careers several times in their lifetime. Sometimes those career changes are within the same company (for example, IC to

I was told by my mom that people change careers several times in their lifetime. Sometimes those career changes are within the same company (for example, IC to manager role). 10 years from now, you might not be coding; but, right now, do you want to? If you want to, if you like it more, maybe you could do that instead. Senior and Principal software engineers at some companies manage projects (so you'll still get some managerial experience if you want to go back to it), and they still code. And there are a lot more software engineers now than there were back when age-ism was a bigger thing. More software engineers getting older means a larger pool of old software engineers, means there's more good, older software engineers and they'll fight back or destroy some of the old age-ism stuff. For what it's worth, I've worked at companies where there were definitely older gentlemen in engineering roles, a network engineer who was a genius and very well respected. It all depends on where you work. Do what you like, you've only got one life :)