I know what you mean! One way to meet lots of people you’d be able to relate to without abandoning your engineering career is to start a startup - your own com

I know what you mean! One way to meet lots of people you’d be able to relate to without abandoning your engineering career is to start a startup - your own company, where you use your developer skills to make a product. That’s what I did, and the only time I dove back into depression was after we got acquired and I had to deal with a regular job again. If you don’t have any ideas, there are lots of folks looking for technical cofounders - e.g. at this YC resource: https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching https://www.ycombinator.com/cofounder-matching Being a founder comes with its own set of challenges, but over the past few years mental health in entrepreneurship has been adopted as a serious issue by the community - you’d have a wealth of resources and plenty of people will help you without expecting anything in return.