I am back in the industry as a senior engineer, but I did take a two year break at one point in order to be a video game producer/designer at a small company.

I am back in the industry as a senior engineer, but I did take a two year break at one point in order to be a video game producer/designer at a small company. I actually think maybe I should have stuck with video game production, it would have probably been more fulfilling overall, met a lot more interesting and creative people, had more fun more often, the games I'd work on would still be out there and playable in some form or another (as opposed to everything I've worked on for enterprise either being private and/or thrown away by now), less judged on 'making this thing work by the end of the two weeks or risk getting fired, and after that making this new thing work by the next two weeks or risk getting fired, and it will never end', but it felt like my tech skills were atrophying and at the time that was driving me crazy. But I really liked that particular job and would have happily kept working there if the company didn't have a run of bad luck (and a few poor business decisions, in hindsight). You can try something new for a while. The industry will still be there. There's a good chance you'll have to take a significant pay cut, though, like your salary could easily be 50% or less of what you're making now, depending on what your current salary is and what you'd like to try instead. I'm not worried about bootcamps churning out developers. About fifteen years ago (might have the exact years wrong, memory is fuzzy) it was a similar situation, but universities were getting those people flooding in as computer science majors, and a good chunk of them were being filtered out and changed majors pretty quick (The professors at my university talked about it). Programming is hard, and not a lot of people are cut out to be good software engineers, definitely not as much as there is demand for good software engineers. It's likely that a lot of those people won't be able to handle anything significant and/or won't last more than about five years in the industry (not all, I've met some great bootcamp grads, but they'd also do well if they took a few college classes if bootcamps didn't exist). > Most weekends are spent trying to "heal" from the week, same for outside work hours. Yeah, definitely feel you on that. I have so many games I'd love to build in my spare time, but when I have the time I just don't want to program anymore, I want to relax.