I guess it depends on the degree of need. If I were starving and had no choice but to take up drawing as a career, I guess I would try. But if technology were s

I guess it depends on the degree of need. If I were starving and had no choice but to take up drawing as a career, I guess I would try. But if technology were still something you could make $40k/yr doing, I'd probably stick with it, because it's more interesting to me. I'm in technology for the technology more than for the money. In some ways I kind of wonder if it'd like it more: what would technology as a field be like if the $100k+ jobs and big exits were gone, and the people who were here primarily for the money therefore lost interest and went elsewhere? I think that's reasonably common. I can't think of people I'd consider "highly meritorious" technologists who have no strong like of technology, and picked the field just because it was a good career. In fact may of them picked the field in a previous era, when it wasn't as lucrative of a career. I think many people who are good at and interested in something have fairly high "stickiness" to it, so salaries tend to track the rise and fall of the fields, more than the merit of individual people, who don't switch fields that easily or quickly. It's in that sense I'm skeptical that salaries are a good indication of "merit". They're just an indication of what they literally are: the current relationship between market supply and demand for a specific skill. This may even related to all kinds of structural issues, e.g. quick spikes in demand coupled with slowly responding training pipelines may cause high salaries in an area to persist for a decade or two, but this has more to do with the training pipeline's slow response than the existing workers' high merit. (And similarly in reverse.)