I was a full time JavaScript developer with 15 years invested in the career. It’s all I knew professionally and was really confident at it in both the browser a

I was a full time JavaScript developer with 15 years invested in the career. It’s all I knew professionally and was really confident at it in both the browser and Node. For years I had wanted to step away and do something else. I had grown largely incompatible with the hiring market as I was interested in performance and writing original applications. Most of the hiring market was only interested in putting text on screen with large frameworks for CRUD applications. Last year I was laid off. For the first time I no longer had maximum career mobility based upon talent and experience. I really had to compete against junior developers for interviews and was no longer interested in doing beginner work. After several months of unemployment I stopped trying. I made a promise to myself to never go back to any kind of JavaScript work except for personal projects. I stopped my open source contributions, stopped responding to recruiters, and abandoned that career. Fortunately a recruiter for a data science job found me. I easily passed the interview and spent the first couple months at self education until I passed the required certification test. Now I am a data science guy instead of a programmer. All of my peers are former developers.