[orange_tee]

You're completely off the mark.

First of all your fears are completely unfounded. Statistics are still predicting growth in IT and software development. And looking at how tooling has evolved, yes in some ways it is now a little easier to create a 1995 style website, BUT websites have become super complicated and now it is the full time job of somebody to work on just the front-end. A 2020 website still takes a lot of effort to produce, in fact definitely much more effort than a 1995 website.

Secondly you mention a bunch of fields, some of which I have experience with. These more fundamental fields have little demand, and because of that the pay is relatively bad. If you go work at Intel writing NLA libraries using Fourier Transforms, you would be lucky to get paid market average salaries and certainly much worse salaries than doing generic SWE stuff at FAANG.

And thirdly, honestly you won't be able to transition into these more technical fields because it is just too much of a steep learning curve. And nobody would hire you anyway. There's no shortage of graduates fresh out of uni with multiple semesters of theory, practical projects and internships.

The actual way to prepare would be as always: maximize your salary and save as much as possible.

[minimalismhuh]

Thank you a thousand times for your valuable input. :) This shows me, that my "intuition" or rather "internal operating system" is flawed and needs to be recalibrated. Yeah, then maybe the naysayers were kind of right telling me that I am wasting my time doing fundamentals. However, I really actually enjoy it learning what is going on behind the scenes. Even if it doesn't make me "valuable" in the job market. I should perhaps do what everyone else does: investing, learning front end and APIs (or whatever is required in the market RN). But your last sentence also resonated with me:

"The actual way to prepare would be as always: maximize your salary and save as much as possible."

That's for having a "psychological leverage/advantage" I guess. If you are not having money issues you will likely get rid of the "draining background processes" in your head and focus on more productive things. So in other words FU money is always good. :)