It's crazy how prevalent this is among my peers. Do any other careers have so much pivoting?
I also think working for most corporations is pretty lackluster, and after the early career honeymoon phase wears off many people start to feel quite unfulfilled.
Working with your hands, or in support of helping other people, is very intrinsically rewarding work. There are reasons society gets away with paying public school teachers so little, and only some of them have to do with the public's distain for taxes, hah.
IT professionals are typically the kinds of people who are happy to learn something new, so I'm not too surprised to see the people with the financial means, the disposition, and the mid-life crises search for a new life path.
Are your peers about the age as the OP?
Kids and age (each) can change how we feel about job demands.
To an outsider, you're just a programmer. No career change at all. I think there's just enough variety in our field that we don't leave much.
Is this true? It doesn't seem true to me. Are there data / studies on this?
My professional white-collar wife has done 3 changes already and we're barely middle-aged. I've done 2 myself (factory worker -> Researcher -> Engineer).
My Mom has done about 5-6. My dad 1. My mother in law has done at least 5, and my father in law at least 3.
My brother has done 2 (soldier -> sales -> design). My 4 bros-in-law have done at least 3 each (all starting with soldier).
Sis in law has done 0. My sisters are 3,2 and are still young.
Does my story cancel yours? no, but the story isn't clear either.
Was being a factory worker a career, or was that a job you were doing before you started your first career as a researcher?
But I do think this thread is making me realize that this is probably a boring dispute over what "career" means.
BLS does say you'll switch jobs about 12 times in your career.
And I will stipulate that there are some definitions of "career change" that I guess seem plausible, for which "3-4" seems reasonable for "most people", but I dunno, those definitions still seem like a stretch to me...
Should it count as a "career change" when I went from working at a pizza shop early in college to doing test prep and tutoring in the middle? Or from that to little freelance contract programming projects later? That was a number of different "jobs", but I think zero "careers". Or has it been a career change when I've left different kinds and sizes of software companies in various industries for other ones of other sizes and kinds in different industries? Or when I've switched roles from pure individual contribution to more technical leadership? This is also a bunch of different jobs, but I think of all of it as one single career...
I think of a career change as being from one thing a person has done for long enough to be skilled and successful at it, to another thing requiring training (formal or informal) on a new set of skills. Is it actually common to do that 3-4 times? I do know a fair number of people who have done this once. I can't think of a single person I know, of any age, who has done it more than twice. And the one person I know who has done it twice gets a bunch of good-natured ribbing about always being in training and spending hardly any time doing.
Is this just a definition thing? Is my bar for what is a different career unusually high?