I grew up as a young 20-ish programmer in a FOSS community that had multiple people in their 60s and 70s act e.g. as module maintainers and similar, and you can be productive and matter and contribute to greater things for far longer than most people seem to assume.
The bottom line is perhaps more that "finding ways to apply yourself" and doing the right things is challenging at any age.
Some solutions require an entirely new perspective while others require a lifetime's worth of information and experience to be properly collated I guess.
"Vonnegut definitely had survived a lot. His once wealthy family was impoverished by the Great Depression, causing grim strains in his parents' marriage. His mother committed suicide. His beloved sister died of breast cancer, a day after her husband was killed in a train accident. But the defining horror of Vonnegut's life was his wartime experience and surviving the Dresden bombing, only to be sent into the ruins as prison labour in order to collect and burn the corpses."
From: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/dec/03/kurt-vonnegut-...
Not exactly a life made in a bed of roses, to put it mildly. I realize he's not perfect, but then again, neither am I and probably neither are you, shooting your arrows from behind comfy anonymity.
Your characterization doesn’t make any sense anyway. A nepo baby how? He wasn’t in the construction business, working a cushy job in dad’s company. He sold cars and did PR work while trying to write. His family’s past seems to have conferred him no advantage whatsoever.
The lessons here are two-sided: First of all, don't write off experienced tech workers just because they don't have the spark of youth. Second of all, don't write yourself off just because you haven't had your breakthrough yet.
Sure, Slaughterhouse Five was Vonnegut's big financial breakthrough, but by that time he was a very well-known writer with several classics, including Player Piano and Harrison Bergeron, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and made a decent living from writing full time. Not glamorous for sure, but in line with most very good writerd.
Far from demonstrating the author's thesis that "failure can ripen into art", his story is the story of a man that had no notable failures in writingy, who consistently produced great work, and continued to do so until he made it big.
Colonel Sanders started KFC in his 40s and didn’t come up with the signature recipe until he was 50. KFC as we know it didn’t exist until he was 65.
Truth is, most successful business owners start in their mid 40s or around 40.
asimpletune•44m ago
mattmaroon•24m ago