[john_moscow]

>After 10 years of that I wanted to move back into pure coding. With great experience should be easy right? Wrong. The trouble is that the "just coding" experience gets very quickly outdated. Your knowledge of Win32 API or WPF isn't really relevant on a Python job. Interestingly, the skills that don't get outdated mostly lay outside the technical part: your ability to manage people and resolve conflicts, your ability to present ideas and convince others, your ability to spot business niches and shape products under limited resources.

In the old times one could argue that being a good engineer (i.e. finding simple solutions to tough problems) makes a difference, but I'm not sure how much this holds anymore for software engineers, since the complexity isn't in about fitting your business processes into the SQL/backend/frontend bounds, but rather in defining those processes and making proper assumptions about the market.