But, as someone who also went towards the arts (I'm a regularly gigging musician) and letters (I have a BA in Philosophy and dumpped my PhD during my dissertati

But, as someone who also went towards the arts (I'm a regularly gigging musician) and letters (I have a BA in Philosophy and dumpped my PhD during my dissertation), I can say that it wasn't super hard to get back into a technical position coming from a high-school and early college education where I learned a lot of logic, math, and programming skills... since leaving my PhD program I've been consulting doing PHP-based development for the last 4 years, and I'm on track career wise as I would have been if I was teaching at a university somewhere. This is wholly a un-based feeling, but I feel that it has been a lot easier to pick up new and professionally useful technical skills in my 30s than it would have been if I had done well in my 20s with a technical career and had to pick up the useful philosophical and musical skills I enjoy using in my 30s.