In reflecting on my career I can say I got into it for the right reasons. That is, I liked programming — but also found out fairly quickly that not everyone could do it and so it could be a career path that would prove lucrative. And this in particular for someone who had no other likelihood, for example, of ever owning a home. I was probably not going to be able to afford graduate school (had barely paid for state college by working minimum wage jobs throughout college and over the summers) and regardless I was not the most studious person. (My degree was Education — I had expected a modest income as a career high school teacher).

But as I say, I enjoyed programming at first. And when it arrived, the web was just a giant BBS as far as I was concerned and so of course I liked it. But it is possible to find a thing that you really like can go to shit over the ensuing decades. (And for that matter, my duties as an engineer got shittier as well as the career "evolved". I had not originally signed up for code reviews, unit tests, scrum, etc. Oh well.)

Money as a pursuit made sense to me after I was in the field and saw that others around me were doing quite well — able as I say, to afford to buy a home — something I had assumed would always be out of reach for me (my single mother had always rented, I assumed I would as well — oh, I still had a modest college loan to pay off too). So I learned about 30-year home loans, learned about the real estate market in the Bay Area, learned also about RSUs, capital gains tax, 401Ks, index finds, etc.

But as is becoming a theme in this thread (?) at some point I was satisfied that I had done enough to secure a home, tools for my hobbies, and had raised three girls — paid for their college. I began to see the now burdensome career I was in as an albatross around my soul. The technology that I had once enjoyed, made my career on the back of, had gone sour.