ditados

For the fourth or fifth time now, I've made it through an interview gauntlet (this time for a well-known, largely remote company) and got the dreaded "the team was looking for someone at an earlier stage in their career" euphemism in a (somewhat late) reply.

I breezed through all the technical discussions (I am not a worldwide expert in the particular niche they were hiring for, but knew all the internals, actually contributed to or dealt with issues in the internals and fulfilled all the requirements), and was interviewed by peers (around half my age), my prospective manager (closer, but easily 10-15 years younger) and moved up the chain until I came across two managers (probably 5 years younger than me) who were visibly uncomfortable with the notion that I would "downgrade" to a senior SE role after having years of management and consulting experience (including being a department head).

I needed that job. Not in the sense of being unemployed, but in the sense of being able to do something I loved again (my current role is... a challenge, in more ways than one), of being there for my kids again, and, to be quite frank, to build something useful.

How do you cope?

What else is there but trying to do consulting on my own? (I'm not in a very big market, and most of it is outsourced corporate IT, zero custom development, etc.).

I'm pushing 50 (although I don't look or act like it) and I am trying to get out of the consulting/sales rat race and back into actual engineering after a long stint working with enterprise IT customers and trying to get them to move to modern devops/SRE/data services in the cloud -- it was gratifying in many regards, but intensely frustrating from a management/ownership standpoint, since you're often thrice removed from the actual decision making and technology choices.

I considered going solo or starting a small company with a couple of friends, but I need a very steady pay check (even if smaller) and contract work is belittled in my neck of the woods (Southern Europe), so I'm currently running what passes for the tech interview gauntlet these days, with uneven results--I am either passed over solely due to perception (age, current role, etc.) or go through the entire pipeline.

Explaining that I'm not afraid of (re-)learning anything (and even with a portfolio of stuff and good references) and having a decades-old MSc seems to be looked down upon by fresh PhDs, and expectations towards specific areas of expertise seem to be unrealistically high sometimes, but I usually get through those and am eventually excused away because I'm too senior (often more senior than the interviewers or future managers, which I'm OK with but clearly raises a few eyebrows and I suspect is the main reason I'm turned away, followed by the "sales" thing).

I know there are a lot of folk like me around--how did you succeed in getting rid of the "customer facing" taint and doing a career move _back_ to Engineering?

I've been bombarded with recruiter contacts for a number of positions lately, and I'd like to poll the hivemind about whether or not these are standard fare in Europe:

- Not telling me who they're hiring for (from a recruiter that "specializes in relocation")

- Not disclosing base salary (but asking for mine)

- Asking me for a CV when they already have a complete LinkedIn profile (and an online resumé)

- Wanting to "chat" and tossing me into an impromptu phone interview

- Trying to connect on LinkedIn and then going away forever

Is there anything I've missed? Discuss.