Similar age group, also rather stay IC than management, already hat it as team lead and it wasn't fun.

I try to focus on mentoring and technical architecture stuff, pure coding has decreased quite substancially, between SaaS, iPaaS, serverless, and nowadays AI agents, that just being a plain old IC doesn't cut it.

Then there is the difficulting to get new job offers as IC, because in many European countries there is this culture that after 50y one is either self-employeed/freelancing or a manager.