I changed careers and found the change fun. I may go back to coding at some point, I kinda miss the that deep thinking it requires .... but I can do that in my spare time if I really need to.
Or, if you need the money, just phone it in for a while.
I never got what was so great about travelling. Whenever I tried doing it, I was almost immediately bored and lonely. It proabably works much better for extraverts.
In terms of career change, I'm not sure that's possible without moving. I live very rural, there's almost no jobs here that aren't retail. If I stay here I'm basically forced to continue remote dev work. I actually want to move, but I don't think I'm in a good position to take such a risk.
> Or, if you need the money, just phone it in for a while.
One way or another I'm going to draw it out as long as possible, I basically don't have a choice.
I don't know your life situation, but it's possible you could travel to a city in your timezone and get a short-term rental of some sort and work from there as you investigate the city and its options. You could probably go a timezone or two away and still not need to actually make it obvious; of course swapping to the other side of the world would be more difficult.
Even if you chose to return you'll at least have more knowledge about the options.
Tech prospects look bleak, I think the party will be over in 10 or less years as engineers are viewed more as a cost vs value add.
Seems realistic, though optimistic. I think the party will be over sooner than that, probably in the next 5 or so years, but we'll collectively be in denial about it for at least another 5 years following that.
Let's be honest here; a lot of what we do involves navigating the theology of software more so than actually performing valuable work. Take frontend, for instance. Frontend development is continuing to move towards Java-esque complexity all while providing no measurable improvement in efficiency or reduction in bugs. New features ship slower than they used to. Until someone can show actual evidence that "modern" web development is a measurable improvement over the old days, I'll believe it when I see it, and what I've seen for most of my career now is adherence to a bunch of clever ideas that don't really improve anything.
Yes, more tech jobs have been needed to compensate for the onslaught of bullshit, but much of that bullshit was invented by the holders of those very jobs. Much of object-oriented dogma alone invented a bunch of jobs that otherwise wouldn't have existed because it created more problems than it actually solved. When the going gets tough, economically speaking, no one's going to give a fuck about all the frameworks, all the needless abstractions, all the supposed "best practices", all the build tools, all the lint rules, all the devops, all the stupid ass containerization schemes, or any of that jazz. With some exceptions, machine learning probably being one of them, what isn't necessary will be culled. Companies that know better are going to suddenly become interested in what their engineers are actually doing, will remove the low-performers, and tell their remaining engineers to stop making things complicated.
I remember the Windows shrink wrap days and everyone predicting doom, and then the internet happened. Next is AI and then the metaverse most likely.
I think the future is bright.
I find it rather hard to generate 100s of millions of dollars of wealth through metal working.
On the flip side, which is harder to outsource? For metal trinkets it would be similar, for stuff that needs to be on prem.. metal working would be outsource proof.
Eh, there are some moats. For example around Law.
Imagine how much members of the US could save with offshored and outsourced law?
But lawyers have a strong guild protecting them. Software developers do not.
The worst that will happen is that some companies are chasing opportunities that aren't profitable enough to hire tech workers.
Most experts who have any data or solid reasoning agree that tech jobs won't get slashed permanently.