My anecdata is returning to full time work at 54, after ~20 years consulting. To keep a long story short, my development years were 25-30 years ago, I knew the

My anecdata is returning to full time work at 54, after ~20 years consulting. To keep a long story short, my development years were 25-30 years ago, I knew the owner from consulting, and was working through his company on another gig. He knew I had some spare time and asked if I could fill a gap on contract. That led to converting to “wage slavery” with an excellent base salary, profit sharing, and an equity share in the two products I’m working on. So after 20 years of writing governance documents, doing threat risk assessments and privacy impact assessments, occasionally writing SELinux policy, and some product management like work, I’m doing full stack development on the software product (node, React, ONgdb) and writing C, bash, and SELinux on the hardware product. I also do customer needs analysis, custom development for them, and train them. And I do all of the demos. Perhaps it’s my field, perhaps it’s a unique skill set (we ICAM/CDS people are rare), perhaps it’s personality (curious, enthusiastic, measured). I dunno. Now 56, I foresee doing this for a few years more. The pace can be insane (hey, startup, or at least small consulting firm turning itself into a product company) but the work extraordinarily rewarding (when you ship a CDS product that has the experts asking “how did you do that?” it feels really good; when you show your clients an IRM that does things no one else does, ditto), and I work with really good friends (friends I’d never worked with before but knew from weekend activities (off-roading)). It can happen. I just don’t know how rare it is. (Hey! I may be a unicorn!!! :-})