I have been coding since 1977, but I have only had one job where coding was about 15% of my working tasks. I see coding as a tool, and have used in all of my jo

I have been coding since 1977, but I have only had one job where coding was about 15% of my working tasks. I see coding as a tool, and have used in all of my jobs. Now, I use TaskJuggler and track my projects using it. I write desktop utilities in J for my engineering issues. I write small apps in Frink, C, J (switching to Dyalog APL), F# or Python to assist me, and sometimes other engineers (not software, mechanical, civil, marine, entertainment engineering) at my current job. I have even used Racket with Rosetta to do some generative geometry for a challenging structural job. I script Rhino3D, FreeCAD, Blender3D, and AutoCAD. I love coding, so I get to play at work and at home with it - it is not my main task at work. I read old and new, highly academic books on coding. Early on I made the comparison of coding full time to the word processors of the 70s and 80s. People talked about how if you learned WordPerfect you could make so much money. Then it happened in the late 90s early 2000s with "website creators". I have made sites for some small companies in ColdFusion, ASP, and plain HTML/CSS/JS. People took training, and at first made decent salaries, and then they became a commodity when salaries equalized with market forces of a large labor pool. I see a somewhat similar phenomenon going on with the basic coder today, especially front end or even full stack developers. ML/AI and data science is the latest refuge to at least allow coders to expand into statistics and mathematics with evolutionary algorithms, neural networks, etc. I was reading about neural networks, fuzzy logic, and genetic programming, since 1988. I am so glad I didn't pursue it as a job. I might have liked pursuing it academically, but I probably would have wound up in a related job. In other words, you're not just a coder, and I say that not disparagingly, but as what I see as a return to what coding was when it started - a cool tool to be used for your tasks at hand. There are those who truly want to code 24/7, and I see why, and can empathize with why they stay a programmer and don't move on to middle management. I may have chosen that path. I am glad I didn't because I have many other interests that I pursued through the many jobs in many fields I have had, and coding is always a tool in my pocket.