There are fields where age (read: experience) is a benefit and not a liability. These are areas in which making mistakes is VERY expensive and taking the time t

There are fields where age (read: experience) is a benefit and not a liability. These are areas in which making mistakes is VERY expensive and taking the time to do things "the right way" and getting it right the first time is worth the extra investment. These are fields such as: research, biotech, pharma, cyber security, medical, utilities, oil/gas, space (NASA), air (Boeing), defense, ... If you don't have skills immediately pertinent to domains such as these, you may have skills that are tangentially related and allow you to get in the door and then become indispensable and branch/learn. Also, you may have skills that are huge benefits and don't even know it. Examples: applied probability, databases, big data, ETL pipelining, business continuity, encryption, 3D visualizations + animation. I'm in biotech/pharma (48 y.o.), and know several programmers who started as web developers and ended up making front-end UIs (e.g. Streamlit apps) that were of immense benefit to the researchers. Over time they pick up some genetics, move over to help other teams, etc.