[digging]

As someone in a similar position, may I take a tangent? I'm curious what you transitioned into out of programming. The stress of feeling "always behind" is taking its toll on me, and I wonder about another career change often.

[karaterobot]

I joined the software industry at a small consultancy that needed me to do a lot of different things, including both programming and design. So I got experience doing both of those. When I left the consultancy world in 2016, I had to decide whether to sell myself to employers as either a programmer or a designer—normal companies want you to pick a single lane—so I just focused on my design experience, and started doing that as a day job. I went from a fancy title to a much less fancy title for my first job as a designer, but more or less worked back up from there. I think for most programmers, their fork in the road would be to stay as an individual contributor or become a manager, but I don't want to be a manager, and was lucky to have a different path to fall back on.