Most people I work with seem to have just fallen into it. I was set since I was a child in the 1980s to become a professional programmer as I played around with BASIC on a Commodore and QBASIC on a 286. But as 2000 came around, everyone told me that programming was dead due to outsourcing. That was the idea at the time. What was true was something in the middle- it was becoming a damaged field. With no professional organization / union mechanism to keep it afloat as a bastion of the middle class. So I went into networking and mostly took whatever job was available, doing systems work and then devops.

After seeing Azure and AWS come online, that felt like a field that would shrink to a few cloud engineers, rather than be a field of CI/CD experts. I took a gamble to leave my job and study up, as I did have VB courses in high school (I attended the local college while in HS) and Java in college. So I studied up on Python, not knowing if I would fail at this endeavor and going to plan B (devops). I ended up switching to the .Net space and C#, and after months of 2-3 interviews a day, 3-4 days a week leaving my head empty and buzzing at the end of the day, I finally got hired.

I've worked on a few projects ever since in that same job, and still enjoy the coding, but don't enjoy the time limits or the general disrespect that you won't get in other careers. You're making Fabergé eggs and you're treated like you work in a factory. If I were to do it over again I would probably have gone into welding or another trade. Work where you can't just hire someone across the globe for.