I went to college for art, but had to drop out due to high expenses. I became a self taught programmer, starting with game development. That didn’t pay off, of

I went to college for art, but had to drop out due to high expenses. I became a self taught programmer, starting with game development. That didn’t pay off, of course, but it was intrinsically interesting which allowed me to learn useful tech in my own way. I did some work creating Wordpress sites for a branding company. Then I got an internship at a south CA game dev company. It was clear that I had a lot to learn still, but I wasn’t discouraged yet. I found a full time software job at a small educational software company, which I enjoyed but started to feel fatigued with learning about modern front end dev. I had to leave due to money issues. I was barely paying rent and Amazon offered twice my salary for a support eng position. I was mislead into thinking that I’d be creating tools, but instead I was spending all day and night on tickets, alerts, and deployments. This is when I burned out, and I couldn’t force myself to learn any more. It was a scary thing because my ability to learn new things was the only thing I could depend on. I was on a PIP and eventually left. SDE recruiters don’t contact me now that I had “support” in my title. I got a couple I interviews which I bombed due to not being able to study for the position. I’m on a support role at another FAANG now. It’s cushy and pays well but I’m struggling every day due to trouble focusing and how repetitive things are. My memory isn’t good, which makes remembering teams, names, and processes difficult. It has been an overall very difficult period. I’m likely going to be let go in the next couple months because I won’t go back into the office. I’m worried about what will happen and don’t have any real plans. I can live on savings for a couple years but it would be stupid to do so. I’ll likely have to find another tech job soon. I haven’t been studying so it will be difficult to interview and do the job. I’ve been coasting on what I learned during my early years. Hopefully I can find something remote. Hope my story helped. Best of luck to you and anyone reading this.