I'm 40, went through the job search cycle this spring and can share my experience. First: I've been working in tech for ~20 yrs. First 6-7 as an IC, then 8 as

I'm 40, went through the job search cycle this spring and can share my experience. First: I've been working in tech for ~20 yrs. First 6-7 as an IC, then 8 as a dev manager, then 5 as a senior IC (I'd grown weary of middle management and wanted to have fun coding again) before beginning the latest job search. Of FAANG I interviewed with 3 - Amazon, Netflix, Facebook. Amazon's process was the least worst IMHO. Programming questions seemed less gotcha, less Leetcodey, altho major negative demerits for forcing candidates to memorize Jeff Bezos' "leadership principles" and demanding they share canned anecdotes from their career how they demonstrated them. The biggest problem however was the hiring manager was the very last interview and he ended up being an aggro jerk with little or no visible social skills, the kind of horror story you read about on HN. Shouldn't he have been the first? No offer and I would have rejected one anyway, especially because their comp sits behind a 4-year vesting cliff. Netflix was odd: I applied for a senior full stack role only for the hiring manager to tell me mid-interview the job was actually a front end role, dashboarding Netflix's internal tools. Why misrepresent it then? They ended up ghosting me, but no more front end for me, ty. Facebook was by the far the worst, and I interviewed 2x for 2 different roles. YMMV but 2 Leetcode q's read off by bored, mid-level employees. Not a single question about anything else. Maybe that's a fine process for college grads but for someone with decades of experience? As a former hiring manager I honestly found it comical. I interviewed with 6 other companies before landing at my current gig as a Principal Engineer for a global media company. None of them made me offers but I wasn't too passionate about pursuing them. Often I didn't believe in the business model (e.g. "AI to solve customer support!", "ML for more accurate real-estate appraisals!") but maybe I just sucked too? Idk. When I interviewed for my current role my hiring manager seemed really smart and had 10+ yrs of experience beyond mine. He also gave no coding tests (!!) and instead just had me speak to a lot of other senior people. I'm six months into the role and so far, so good. No job is ever perfect but I'm happy I made the switch, and I feel like it's a good pathway into an executive role at a startup or some other company. My general advice would be to keep at it, be patient. In some ways it's just a numbers game. Or maybe more like dating, where you can go on 500 bad dates but number 501 could be the one. Don't take an offer just for the money if you don't get a good vibe from the people. Also a huge salary becomes less and less important the older you get, find something that makes you happy. Good luck.