I worked, in service, well into my fifties, (as have many of my friends). In nice bars and hot restaurants, doing snooty catering, and making good money. You can tell yourself, it’s your age, or it’s your degree, but the truth is closer to the hard fact that people who really want some other type of job, make terrible servers. Their effects on the rest of the staff are almost never positive, to be honest. Managers know this and can recognize who’s unlikely to be a good fit with their staff.
Also, if you think service is non competitive you’ve pretty clearly, no idea what you’re on about. Servers routinely compete, encouraged by management, for the best shifts. Some places you have to work a lot of shitty shifts before you get a shot at Friday night, and some good money.
I’m a software developer and this is the exact opposite of what you see every day. The “minimum productivity required” is not defined. People are constantly trying to get their action items done quicker to impress management so that when budget cuts come, they will not be the ones selected for layoff. Yes, there are “deadlines”, but they don’t really mean anything except “This is the date we think you’ll be done given the estimates, but if the estimates are wrong, we expect you to do as best you can.” Missing a deadline is not “poor performance” unless management feels that you missed it because of laziness or incompetence, not that you missed it because of an error in the original estimate.