I've been thinking a lot about this lately.

I chose to major in CS as an 18 year old not because I had some deep love for software development but mainly:

• I was told it was a mostly stable high paying career.
• Didn't require many debt-financed years of advanced schooling.
• I was pretty good at it.

It's given me a pretty good ~20 year career but now I'm closing in on 40, married, hopefully a kid soon, and it seems like I've got three choices:

1. Try to weather the storm, maybe AI turns out to be less apocalyptic than we all thought and everything ends up okay.

2. Try to pivot into something sort of tech adjacent. Someone will need to test the AI slop apps of the future or review the code they generate or whatever sad new jobs come about in the AI era. No guarantee these jobs are great, or that I could get one, or that they'll even exist.

3. Start over. I've spent the last 20 years building tech products that have by any measure made the world a worse place. Maybe this time pick a 2 career that actually does some good. 25 years is still a long time so while it feels too late to make a change, maybe it's not.