I quit during the first dot-com bomb. I was a UNIX sysadmin for a large company. I had been interested in geodesy and GPS/GIS for a long time, so I became a lan

I quit during the first dot-com bomb. I was a UNIX sysadmin for a large company. I had been interested in geodesy and GPS/GIS for a long time, so I became a land surveyor and GPS/GIS technician. I also did a lot of hydrography and even LiDAR work. In 2008, when the subprime mortgage crisis hit, everyone thought that the crash would only affect residential real estate, but that turned out to be false—it also took commercial property down, since nobody was buying and selling. The civil engineering firm I worked for laid off all 12 staff surveyors, including me, on the same day. We all ended up down the road at a pub, and the senior surveyors were buying the drinks and we reminisced for a while. But that was effectively the end of two-man survey crews and traditional total station/transit instrument tech. Now it's all robotics and scanning which means one man operations. I then travelled for a while. I went to Israel and a few other countries in the Middle East, met a new girlfriend there, and got married. Before getting married, I decided to go back into technology and become a web developer and slowly move back into DevOps. Unlike some of the people in this thread, I enjoy working in tech a lot more now than I did when I started. I find that working conditions (remote, &c) and pay have improved a lot, and public understanding of what developers do has increased dramatically.