[59jmp]

I also hit some mid-career "challenges" at almost exactly the same time, mid-30s, 15-ish years of experience on what felt like a good track at some household name companies... but in hindsight was relatively low-value work a lot of the time.

It sounds like you (now) have a pretty good picture of the landscape, and where you fit into it. I think it mostly depends on what you want to do long term... if you goal is just to get a day job and pay the bills, then you're probably on the right track, just grind leetcode and market yourself well and you'll get something.

If your goal is to have a satisfying career, it's less clear that you'll be able to find that, and maybe it's worth considering some other options. I'm also in NYC actually and still trying to figure this stuff out myself!

[throaway1991991]

Paying the bills will be a great start for sure :-) but I'm worried that I might be too jaded to find what I might have considered a satisfying career even 5 years back. Like someone else said, no one will remember my performance contributions to some codebase that'll get deprecated long after I'm gone, and I think something about satisfaction in my career depends heavily on what will be remembered and what will be important. Gonna keep chugging away on coding exercises and tighten up my resume, and go from there; hopefully I can find something not too oppressive that allows me to find satisfaction in personal work.

Thanks for sharing your perspective. I'm glad I'm not alone in reaching a point like this in my professional work.

[59jmp]

Sounds like you learnt a valuable lesson (albeit the hard way) about slaving away on low-visibility internal maintenance work for years on end.

The most obvious paths are either to focus more on becoming a deep technical expert, or alternatively being a manager, because for the most part the market just doesn't value > 10 years experience as an individual contributor, with few and rare exceptions.

Although I'm currently employed, I'm also pretty much stuck in a rut, if you are interested email me (in profile) / let's see if we can share notes + work through it together.