Yes. I had a lot of problems. In my late 30s, I worked at a large multinational for 10 years doing... some kind of middlemanagement sharepoint stuff that makes my brain fall asleep just thinking about it. For about the last 4 years i
knew i had to get out, but never did.
Eventually redundancy was offered and i went for it, all eager to throw myself far away from microsoft vista, sharepoint and balanced scorecards into the brave new ubuntu/os-x, ruby, agile world.
I worked on side projects, i built stuff, i hosted on heroku, i went to meet-ups, i got mentored, i did all the stuff... except get a job. I went to interview after interview (where i did actually get an interview). I got short term contracts and held on until i was thrown out - what i realise now that i didn't realise then was my confidence was shot. I was dwindling savings, keeping a brave face throwing myself into everything but the constant rejection was killing me, i just never realised it.
One day a doctor friend mentioned that they needed 'an IT guy' in their clinic, with nothing else going i submitted the 42875th iteration of my cv. I had no idea what the job would entail when i went for it, it turned out that they had no idea what they wanted, but part of the job was making sure that 'PC LOAD LETTER' doesn't stop them from printing letters, but the interesting part was that they had to submit governmental reports on patient demographics and results - this was the interesting bit (for me).
So i took the job (awful, awful pay in the NHS it was about 13K (gbp) but it just about broke me even... although possibly not after childcare). But learned R and started rewriting excel macros and dismantling legacy access databases (where applicable, some were perfectly good) and off loading heavy lifting tasks to R - it was a tremendous expereience. The clinic was very happy with my work (as well as the data stuff i would come in weekends to help fix computers). But the most important thing was i LOVED my work, and so my confidence was back.
This was the single most important thing, i loved my job, i loved getting clinic computers working in an underfunded clinic, i loved helping management identify trends in their clinics. And i came home from work, broke, but very happy. And that was the key to getting my confidence back.
I've since moved, i'm in my 40s still very happy working as a data engineer but the reason i write this is perhaps there is industry bias, perhaps there are people looking at you and thinking 'too old' - but perhaps there are people looking at you thinking you lack confidence. Are there perhaps any places that NEED someone like you? where you could find a fit?