I was in the same boat. I decided to try the research software engineer path (not scientific computing, they are different). The work here is reasonable: Build

I was in the same boat. I decided to try the research software engineer path (not scientific computing, they are different). The work here is reasonable: Build a maintainable piece of software, no need to scale for billion users or sth like that. The downside is that the jobs are contract-based, as is every academic jobs. So I'm thinking of switching to a more practical, less competitive driven field as well.