Title: Experience and connections don&#x27;t seem to matter when you&#x27;re old and crazy.  I&#x27;m 40 years old, and I&#x27;ve been working in tech in some fashion since I was 12.<p>I&#x27;ve managed a dozen datacenters, implemented CFEngine, Chef, Puppet, Salt. I&#x27;ve started 2 failed web apps, a boutique bicycle company, a successful &quot;devops&quot; consulting company that I sold, and a dns company that I sold.<p>I&#x27;m also crazy, bi-polar 2, and have burned many, many bridges. I&#x27;m unable to learn to code at this point, I&#x27;m unable to focus on anything for more than 10 minutes at a time, and that&#x27;s a good day.  I&#x27;ve tried most attention drugs, meditation, every other armchair psychology technique you might suggest. I&#x27;m just incapable of becoming more than just another old sysadmin who writes shell script and a cut and paste coder.<p>I was fired from my last job for daring to ask my boss to narrow the $50k gap between me and everybody else in my team who had the same title as me. I was desperate to find a job and had to accept an insultingly low salary.<p>Now I&#x27;ve applied to about 500 positions with exactly 5 responses. 2 lead to embarassing coding interviews with 22 year old children. The other 3 were polite &quot;go away, old men&quot;.<p>What do you do when you&#x27;re too old to learn like a 20 year old kid, you&#x27;re too worn down to pimp yourself out, and you can&#x27;t deep throat a shotgun because you have a kid to support?
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