[dxbydt]

I know of atleast three software engineers who quit programming to pursue music fulltime.

This lady[1] got a Computer Science degree from UC Berkeley, as even an intern at one of the faangs I believe. Quit the whole thing and caught a flight to India. She's sung about 100 songs now and is quite famous.

This guy[2] got a Computer Science degree and worked as a Visual Basic programmer. Also wrote some FoxPro and Clipper code. Was working at Leading Edge in those days. Quit software and started singing. Has sung over 7000 songs. Very rich, 9 figures.

This guy[3] got a PhD in Computer Science and wrote an algorithm to reduce non-standard matrices to approx Hermite Normal. Wrote a bunch of NLP papers, even published in a pure math journal! Then quit software and started writing songs. Has written over 1000 songs now. Very busy songwriter.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manisha_Eerabathini [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shankar_Mahadevan [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhan_Karky

[an_aparallel]

i grew up around a lot of Indians - I was always jealous of how engrained being good at a musical instrument is within the culture. And the lineage of master to student presented with great importance before every Carnatic performance i've watched.