One of my biggest fears is being aged out of software development as I am almost 40. Over the last year I've been casually looking for a new job while currently employed. Yes I know its not the same, but bear with me. By November I had not yet found a new job and the culture at my current workplace had taken a turn for the worse. I began to worry that I was getting too old for the market. I never contemplated suicide, but I was scared. This is what I did.

1. Setup personally customized email alerts for all the job sites I could find.

2. Sent resumes out every day.

3. I worked on myself. Nearly every day since I've solved leetcode problems, wrote open source software, learned Kotlin, relearned the fundamentals of functional programming, sharpened my python, bought a book on ML and wrote a series of jupyter notebooks working through the standard ML models.

I had many interviews during this time. For some of them I was horribly unprepared, but I used those failures to figure out what I had to know the next time. Within the last week I've received 3 offers. Yesterday I accepted one making great money, working from home, for a company I believe in.

Please fight the fear and keep grinding.