Having worked both as a developer and business consultant, I agree with your friend that a developer job is no more fun than doing due diligence. The main reas

Having worked both as a developer and business consultant, I agree with your friend that a developer job is no more fun than doing due diligence. The main reason is that you actually don't do that much programming a typical job. You spend time in meetings and trying to make sense of specs (if there any), debugging problems with libraries and modules written by others and updating documentation. Maybe you should look at automating the tedious parts of management consulting work with your knowledge of Clojure, etc. You might do this as a side project initially. Once the MVP actually provides productivity, accuracy, etc gains, then you could look at marketing it or simply using it within your current organisation. The latter should win you a reasonable promotion and bonus. One problem that I have experienced first-hand is that when changing careers it is very hard to adjust your lifestyle to cope with the reduced income. With your current technical skill set you will no doubt have to take a pay-cut until you work your way back up a different career ladder.