Despite that, I studied Economics in university. It fit my personality as being a lover of data and 'business' but a lot more of the human side of it. I'd always loved business, and while I started out in business school, I found quickly I didn't like 'business people'. So I switched into Econ. Halfway through my economics degree, I took a course on the history of labor markets. This course made me realize I needed to learn to code to stay relevant for the rest of my life. I didn't have aspirations of doing a trade and the course and further research made me realize how vulnerable my skill set was to automation.
So I finished school and then learned to code. I did a bootcamp, and became a very junior full-stack dev. I absolutely loved programming at this point. But I still missed 'business', so I decided to mix the two and start my own software development company. I quickly figured out there is little money in building businesses websites, but plenty in building custom applications or add-ons for e-commerce businesses and focused my efforts there. I made good money, got to live and work in Europe (I'm Canadian) and overall enojyed myself for a few years.
All the while I was perfectly content in the back-end world of web development, working mostly in Ruby, Elixir and PHP. But the front-end started sneaking in. JS has a way of doing that. Soon I found myself spending more time fixing broken node packages than I was coding. Someone above me said it felt like being a carpenter, while spending 80% of the time fixing your tools. That couldn't have described how I felt any better.
Turns out, while I love programming, I hate JS and the world that node has given us. If you want to work on the web, sadly, you're often faced with dealing with it at some point or another.
At this time, I was also discovering that while I always knew I loved interacting with people, that managing remote teams and having occasional video conference calls was not enough to satisfy my extroverted personality. I was becoming lonely in my work.
So I quit. I spooled down my business, going into maintenance mode only. I've since switched into the finance industry, doing underwriting for a small private bank. I love it. I still write code. I spend a decent portion of my time optimizing our company (we're small and the board is happy with any of my tech proposals so long as I explain the value added) with technology wherever possible.
Programming is now only a small portion of my day, but I treasure it now. I still program in the evenings (Elixir Nerves is super cool!) for fun, and of course at work. But it's not my primary role. I will still get paid, even if Yarn breaks something that day.
I've since discovered that .asdf handles 90% of my dependency problems, and that the finance industry doesn't care if your app uses webpack or any javascript for that matter. Removing the need to follow or even keep up with the latest trends in web development from my life has been a breath of fresh air. I couldn't be happier.
