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Not a dumb question at all.
I am 46 now and am a Senior SRE at at large company here in the valley and have been where you are, I went the startup route for a while but in the end this is a better fit for me. There is an old saying that "someone who doesn't like to talk about their work, hates it." If your free time is not involved with what you do at work then you may be in the wrong profession or, you may have not had a chance to marry the two. Filmmaking and government are both GREAT areas for tech! I used to live in LA and know a lot of people in the movie industry who work in computers there and make a very good living. It's not just VFX folks but also game companies and all the support that goes with media, from websites, pipelines and advertising. There is a ton of ways to be in tech/programming and work in film or game industries in LA or New York. Same goes for politics, except that is going to be more limited to Washington DC (which is surprisingly a great place to live). In DC and the surrounding areas like Maryland is where all your tech folks at a multitude of government contractors, lobbyists, data collection and campaigns (as well as security). If it is just about money and if you want to stay a programmer in regular tech then my advice in answer to this is; challenging yourself is always the best/better option unless you are explicitly taking a break. If you want to advance in your career and not stagnate, if you want to not be bored then you need to challenge yourself at every step. If this is not possible in your job, find a new job. Finding a new job is easier than you might think, every company is hiring programmers, data science, large data, reliability people even in the middle of a pandemic. Most of those companies will move you to one of the hubs of tech. Get that book cracking the coding interview, do practice interviews online, read all the cheatsheets for interviews people have on github, contribute to opensource, write tutorials on Medium and Github pages and try to land a job in Silicon Valley, you will make money and live in a pretty place and if you are careful with money you can retire early. (all the FIRE kids are doing it) Figured I would toss that out there. |