I did nope out of this process last time I was looking, when I moved out of the US and my kids were young - because I just didn't have the time for it. I took a huge pay cut, but I accepted family > career. Since then I managed to almost triple my income through accomplishments and networking, but I still make less than a FAANG senior engineer.
Then I had a close friend, who I encouraged to get into software, land an L5 role at a FAANG with barely 1 year of actual engineering experience. The guy is a complete slacker, and never accomplished much at all until I actively pushed him to try rebooting his career.
He's smart though, and single with no family, so he just grinded leetcode and system design and now he makes 350k/year.
Anyways, that spurred me back into the meat grinder, so here I am. Multiple, large accomplishments under my belt, significant engineering experience. But none of it matters. Not that I expect anyone to have sympathy for me - it's just the way our industry is.
Anecdotally, you have far more experience than me therefore probably already know this, but the skills you're describing sound suited to a digital transformation (buzzword in many old hat businesses transitioning to being 'tech companies')/technical management role as opposed to an out and out engineer at this point. Depends what you want as your day to day.
Then I had a close friend, who I encouraged to get into software, land an L5 role at a FAANG with barely 1 year of actual engineering experience. The guy is a complete slacker, and never accomplished much at all until I actively pushed him to try rebooting his career.
He's smart though, and single with no family, so he just grinded leetcode and system design and now he makes 350k/year.
Anyways, that spurred me back into the meat grinder, so here I am. Multiple, large accomplishments under my belt, significant engineering experience. But none of it matters. Not that I expect anyone to have sympathy for me - it's just the way our industry is.