good for him and sounds like he really enjoyed tech. i burned out after 10 years and am going to art school now. makes me wonder if he wishes he did it earlier.
Took me about 6 years to go from "maybe I should understand computers, and Ruby seems pretty neat!" to "sight... devops is not a role". I'm getting into History professionally now and it's been a blast. Besides, with all the crazy bad primary source databases out there (there are some good ones, but some god-awful ones as well), I can see History needs developers who don't care about making the maximum bucks.