It seems this fixation on the shiny "interesting" jobs is another problem. I'm not getting any younger and I don't doubt there is some ageism in the industry but if we're biasing the search to only include FAANG and a handful of other darlin companies then that's not really a fair analysis of the situation.

Anecdotal but I've seen >40 year old engineers thriving at non tech-hub software companies. There's plenty of interesting B2B companies that lurk in the suburbs or tier-2 or tier-3 cities.

I did not say that it's either FAANG or not interesting. But the companies doing interesting software work tend to be software companies. There are many counterexamples both ways.

It only takes like a month or two to get your skills back.