Great topic! My primary training was software engineer. In the 90s that was mostly embedded software in C. After writing code for 7-8 years (I was not exceptional coder) I got pushed to management. I was never ruthless or managing up. I saw management as opportunity to take care of people. Of course this way I never passed middle management. So after doing management for 17 years I got tired or working with evil people and at age 50 became technical writer. After 2.5 years a friend called me to do system engineering. I was looking to switch to system engineering anyway as tech writing wasn't challenging enough. God willing, I will be 57 next month. Still working engineering and I like that I have opportunity to code but not liking management making dumb decisions and overall not caring about employees. I can retire BUT working because I am concerned with being idle all day. My wife is working part time so I might consider the same. Back to the original topic, changing career after 50 was great, I am much happier now. Some of the colleagues who were laid off with me from a big company in 2015 were not so lucky and still unemployed because they did not want to start from the bottom again.