There are a lot of people who realized being an SWE/Developer was not the right choice for them. This is for lots of good reasons - not having enough interacti

There are a lot of people who realized being an SWE/Developer was not the right choice for them. This is for lots of good reasons - not having enough interaction with other people, feeling too insulated from the outside world, not liking the day-to-day life of a developer, etc. I've worked with ex engineers who are now in Sales, Marketing, Support, Management (Product and People), Education, etc. Some of them are amazing at what they do. One of the best developers and I know moved to the education team in their software company because they got tired of what it meant to be a developer. In that education team they can't release crap just because somebody decided to release something quickly - this was something they got disillusioned with as a developer. You haven't "failed" as a software developer. You're probably just realizing that being a software developer may not be a fit. Nobody will fault you for changing to a different role. Anybody who has worked for longer than 5 years knows that after some point you need new and different challenges. Nobody will see you as a failure unless you say "I failed as a software developer so I want to do something else." Say "I've been doing this for a line and I want to do something different. Since I was a developer, these are the strengths I bring to the role versus somebody who has never developed anything in their life." I say this for myself. I enjoy writing code and I think I'm a decent developer. But the thought of being behind the firewall (basically where I only interact with other people in Engineering, not users) of an Engineering Org just doesn't sit well with me. That's how I ended up in Data Science, where I interact with a lot of people and still write code. A long time ago I took a career counseling course and the teacher (A PhD researcher in Career Counseling) said people typically change their careers 6 or 7 (don't remember the exact number) times in their life. It was hard for me to understand at the time, but after many years of working it makes sense. Some people change their career 5 times over 20 years at the same large company.