[lasryaric]

I'm not as experienced as you are but I completely understand your situation. I'm 26 years old and I was making $190k+ / year - bur I was bored! I was doing more and more management and I was slowly loosing my passion for computer science. After interviewing with a bunch of companies, I found one that I really liked and I joined it. I can't tell you how happy I'm. I'm working on interestong problems, doscovering new technologies (there is still a lot of computer science related problems not solved yet), slowly learning about machine learning, working with talented people, etc.

My salary is lower but still very good compare to a lot of people outside of the silicon valley and my passion is coming back extremely quickly.

Find something different, forget your $200k, money is here to help you, and it is clearly not helping you here. Go outside, on interviews, talk to startups, big companies, who ever you want. A lot of interesting things are going on!

[throwawaydotcpp]

Thanks for your thoughts. I look back on a lot of the random jumping around I did earlier in my career - and I never thought twice about it! I always did what interested me and it was never about money, or wondering what my "career arc" would look like. And yeah, if I had tried to "climb" I might have been better off, but instead I have some cool accomplishments under my belt and I'm proud of my work and have learned a lot. Now, I guess it's unsurprising in the late 30's, to be thinking - will this sustain/increase my employability, will this be sufficient for my retirement, etc -- none of the carefree exploration I used to do on a whim. I'm glad you were able to shake yourself out of a rut, even if it was a golden rut.

[onetom]

Maybe visit Thailand...? And I don't mean a "Hangout" style, Bangkok only trip, but more like travel across, see all ends of it, observe the people and their attitude towards life, look into what do they consider problems... Then Cambodia, Vietnam, Myanmar, India if you got used to Thailand.

It's really transformative. (while not even very expensive)

The Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia is too easy; too many people speak (some kind of) English there.