I tried to change careers once, going back to school to go into medicine. Took a semester off to help a buddy with a software development project and make some

I tried to change careers once, going back to school to go into medicine. Took a semester off to help a buddy with a software development project and make some cash, and never went back. While that says more about me in general than what you're talking about, for me it was a matter of finding problems I cared more about (in my case I was writing public health software) and teams I enjoyed working with. I'm certainly in no position to judge your skillset, but say above that you feel comprable to a senior Google engineer (the relative merit of that being a whole 'nother topic!) yet you mention in another thread you have a sense of trepidation about reading code, working on only new projects, and you rarely feel satisfied with your non-trivial code. To me this suggests perhaps some room for growth as well. I had a great deal of the same feelings about my own code (even to this day on occasion) but i've developed much better elegance to my code as well as an ability to shrug the lack of elegance off as a necessary evil sometimes. I gave up on the medicine thing because as much as I love the field of biology and human health, the lab experience wasn't so much better than coding that it would have changed my life, nor the practice of medicine so financially rewarding it would have compensated for opportunity cost as a reasonably well-paid developer. I've found that my career's had up and down cycles but overall I'm very fortunate to be in this line of work. You might as well, but I don't think you're crazy to want to leave the field either. Whatever you end up doing, best of luck to you in the endeavor!