Is your primary goal to find a more enjoyable day-to-day existence? Or is your primary goal to become very successful? If coding is what you enjoy and nothing

Is your primary goal to find a more enjoyable day-to-day existence? Or is your primary goal to become very successful? If coding is what you enjoy and nothing else matters, taking a junior developer job and just enjoying it despite the hit to your financials is a fine choice. You need to be sure that you actually enjoy programming more than managing, though, because it will quickly become an unhappy experience if you discover you can't take orders from a manager and you spend your days trying to backseat drive the project or usurp your manager's authority. If your goal is career success and accumulating notable achievements, starting over as an engineer at 40 isn't optimal. It's possible to go all-in and accumulate achievements over the next decade, but it's not the most likely outcome. Even if you spend the next 10 years working hard, you'd still only catch up to a 31 year old who has been all-in on software development since graduating college. That's not a bad place to be, but it could be disappointing if your real goal is to achieve notable career success above all else.