👨‍💻 Truths for Engineers in Their 40s (That I Wish I Knew Sooner)

If your 20s were for proving yourself and your 30s were for leveling up, your 40s are for finally building on your own terms — or at least they should be.

I’m a software engineer in my 40s, and as I write this, my birthday’s coming up. Milestones like this tend to make you pause. You look back at the choices you made, the careers you built (sometimes more than one), the times you burned out, and the times you bounced back. You think about what’s next — not just in tech, but in life.

This post isn’t about how to climb the ladder. It’s about how to stop letting the ladder define your life.

Here are the hard-earned truths I wish I’d internalized sooner.

1️⃣ You don’t need to prove yourself anymore

If you’ve made it this far, chances are you’ve shipped code, fixed prod bugs at midnight, mentored juniors, refactored messes, and navigated at least one dumpster fire of a reorg. You have receipts. You don’t need to code the fastest, learn the newest framework, or chase the flashiest job title. You need to focus on what matters to you.

2️⃣ Be ruthless with your time

You no longer get points for saying yes to every meeting, every fire drill, every shiny new side project. Time is your most precious resource — professionally and personally. Protect it like it’s sacred, because it is.

3️⃣ You’re not too old to learn, but you are too tired to waste time

You can absolutely learn new tools, languages, or paradigms. But now you ask better questions first:

“Will this solve a real problem?”
“Is it worth the cognitive overhead?”
“Can I delegate or simplify instead?”

I’m too old to play with toys. A lot of engineers get excited by the latest shiny tech at work, and I get it. But for me? I bring in battle-tested, conventional, widely adopted solutions that I know will hold up. I’ll experiment with new tech on my own time — and if I find something truly valuable, then I’ll bring it to work.

4️⃣ Mentorship is your superpower now

Your job isn’t just to write better code. It’s to make the people around you better. That doesn’t mean hand-holding — it means listening, asking the right questions, offering perspective, and creating psychological safety. It’s not sexy, but it’s what makes teams great.

And if you’re a leader: If I have to choose between product breaking or people breaking, I’ll pick product every time. You can always fix a bug. Burnout, disillusionment, and broken trust are much harder to recover from.

5️⃣ Work is not your family

They may say it is. They may even mean it. But family doesn’t lay you off during a merger. You can care deeply without sacrificing boundaries. Loyalty is earned — not extracted through guilt or Slack emojis.

6️⃣ Reinvention is a feature, not a failure

I changed careers around 30 years old — after more than a decade as a graphic designer. I taught myself to code, started over, and built a whole new trajectory from scratch. You always still have time.

Whether it’s developer experience, product, advocacy, or teaching — your past experience is a foundation, not baggage. You’re not stuck. You’re seasoned.

7️⃣ Sleep > hustle

If you’re still pulling late nights to hit self-imposed deadlines or prove your worth, ask yourself why. You’ve seen what chronic stress can do. You’ve felt it. Your health, your family, your sanity — they matter more than the next big launch.

8️⃣ Discernment is your most valuable skill

You’ve seen enough to spot bad architecture, vague goals, and political landmines from a mile away. Use that experience to steer your team toward clarity, simplicity, and impact. Not everything needs to scale to a million users or run on Kubernetes.

9️⃣ Titles won’t heal you

Becoming a manager or a principal engineer doesn’t fix burnout. It doesn’t fix poor leadership above you, bad culture, or the voice in your head saying “you’re behind.” If you’re unhappy, don’t seek promotion — seek alignment.

🔟 You still have time

You’re not late. You’re not behind. You’re right on schedule for the life you want. You have time to build something meaningful, to switch careers, to take a sabbatical, to write that book, to pick up a paintbrush, to learn piano, to start over if you need to.

You’re in your 40s. You’ve got wisdom, context, and the scar tissue to prove it.
Now’s the time to build a career that feels like yours — not just something you fell into.