You’re a bit of my hero since I aim to be a dev till at least 60. I barely survive Leetcode interviews now — in fact I can’t think of a single one I’ve passed. Having to interview at 60 plus sounds awful, mostly for the reasons you describe.
If you keep those going, you'll do well in almost everything.
I'm loath to give more specific advice, because the whole industry is experiencing a bit of a "sea change," right now, and I'm not sure that past performance is a good indicator of future results.
A soulless job in finance is better if you like(d) ML at all, because then you can keep your interests separate from your job.
Interesting! I never made that connection but now that you mention it it is obvious. Thanks.
I did read somewhere that for someone trying to write a book in their spare time, a job in editing is the worst possible thing to have for a similar reason.
I have friends who work in the M&A world (doing due diligence, C-level advise etc) both here in NL (you'll probably know them) and in the US/CA (in identity/credentials), guess I should have a chat with them :-)
But first I'm going to spend a few months doing something good - seeing if we can actually fix interoperability in healthcare in the EU. Lots of interesting things happening in that space ;-)
I've been in this area for a couple decades now and have seen technologies come and go, so I see my AI-related job now as just another generation of tools and making pretty sure that I keep my knowledge still valid in other non-AI related area in the tech space, so that I'm not a data-science/AI-framework-plumbing kind of person.
I keep an interest in standard C++ desktop development, which to me seem a safe harbour even time there is a collapse in some trendy technology.