Many unemployed people aged 35 and over in IT, who previously wanted to find work, no longer wish to do so.

A few days ago, a 37-year-old operations engineer messaged me on WeChat: “I’m done looking. I’ll take a six-month break first.”

He was laid off last November with an N+1 severance package. At first, he was full of confidence—updating his résumé, practicing interview questions. But after four months, every rejection was either because he was “too old” or his “tech stack was outdated.” The most ridiculous one? A 95-born interviewer asked him: “At your age, are you still writing code?”

He smiled bitterly: “Even my kid says my main job now is interviewing.”

This isn’t an isolated case. I know at least five or six IT friends around 35 who, after repeated setbacks in job hunting, chose to “pause.” It’s not that they don’t want to work—the job market is just so cruel that they’ve been forced to stop.

Where did the 35-year-old IT people go?

When headhunters lose enthusiasm, job postings explicitly say “under 35 only,” and interviewers ignore your “rich experience,” many IT professionals suddenly realize they’ve become the “older youth” in the workplace.

In operations, things are even trickier. Our generation witnessed the entire evolution—from manual operations to automation and cloud-native systems. We know physical servers and are fluent in K8s; we wrote Shell scripts and mastered Ansible. Yet in the eyes of some young HRs, “doing ops at 35” is equivalent to “still using Windows XP.”

As one SRE friend put it bluntly: “Before 35, I was a ‘senior engineer’; after 35, I became ‘too old.’”

It’s not that they don’t want to job hunt—it’s that they can’t afford to

On the surface, it looks like they’re “not looking.” In reality, the return on investment is just too low.

Hundreds of résumés sent out in a month, only three or five interviews, all ending in rejection. Each interview means brushing up on LeetCode, researching the company’s products, memorizing “standard answers”—and then being turned down for “poor cultural fit.”

“Each interview feels like a battle,” another friend said. “Two weeks of prep, two hours of talking, one week waiting—then silence. Wouldn’t it be better to take my kid to the zoo?”

They have some savings (enough for a while), family responsibilities, and clear self-awareness. When the mental toll of job hunting outweighs the stress of working, taking a break becomes the rational choice.

The mid-game break for ops engineers isn’t lying flat

Looking at my “paused” friends, none of them are actually idle:

1. Old A is studying cloud-native security and preparing for the CKS exam.
2. Old B took on a freelance gig migrating legacy systems, with flexible hours.
3. Old C simply enrolled in a cooking class.
4. The boldest, Old D, took his family on a road trip around China: “I’m fulfilling my childhood dream first—then I’ll think about what’s next.”

This feels more like a strategic pause—after running a decade-long marathon, stopping to look at the map and check whether you’re even on the right track.

For us 35+ ops engineers, the technical confidence remains. We just don’t want to “sell ourselves cheap.” We understand networks, systems, architectures; we can troubleshoot and take responsibility—these abilities don’t depreciate with age. They just need new ways to be valued.

The second half—living differently

If you’re also on a break or thinking about one, here are a few suggestions:

Skill upgrade: The real moat in operations isn’t the number of tools you know, but how deeply you understand systems. Dive into fundamentals, study architecture design—those are values age can’t take away.

Side projects: Leverage your broad ops experience to do tech consulting, write technical content, or offer training. It might not pay immediately, but every extra income source adds security.

Downshift: If big-city pressure is too much, explore opportunities in smaller cities. Many traditional enterprises going digital need ops veterans from big companies.

Refocus: Life isn’t just about code. Spend more time with family, on health, and on personal interests—you may find “unemployment” is actually a turning point.

My road-tripping friend put it well: “The first half of life was for survival; the second half, I want to try living.”

At 35, maybe you’re “old” in IT, but in life, it’s only a comma—not a period.

Stopping isn’t scary; what’s scary is sprinting endlessly in the wrong direction. Ops engineers know this best—when a system is under high load, you must gracefully downgrade. Life works the same way.

Instead of draining yourself in an ill-fitting job, it’s better to hit pause and replan your route.

After all, the best fault recovery is prevention. And the best life plan is finding a rhythm that fits you.

To all the ops veterans in their “mid-game break” — we’re not avoiding work; we’re preparing for a stronger comeback.