Yeah, I'm going back to school for a different field (environmental engineering, of the crystals and concrete sort). But if I'm being honest with myself, my main preparation isn't educational but attitudinal/emotional: accepting that I will probably be much poorer in the second half of my life than the first. If retirement seemed a distant prospect before, it will certainly be an impossibility now.

I've done web dev long enough (nearly 30 years) to see it grow from some niche field for nerdy teenagers and certain businesses, to exploratory and revolutionary in the Gmail days, to now taken over by global capital and hypercommercialized.

I thought my labor was fairly compensated at $20 to $40 an hour, working for small businesses and being part of their communities not much different than a graphic designer or brochure maker.

When web dev work skyrocketed to $150-$200+ an hour, as it did during the pandemic years, it just looked like another insane dot com bubble to me. I'm glad that burst and I hope it stays that way -- IMO nothing tech gives us is worth the enshittification it causes our societies and cities, in terms of rampant homelessness and lack of housing, etc.

While challenging on a personal level, I think this was a necessary market adjustment. I know from direct experience my work isn't very difficult, both compared to other parts of the web stack and compared to the many technical fields that require years of study and PhDs and such. The wage explosion we enjoyed was just caused by speculatory investment, a form of gambling all its own, not because our skill or social value suddenly skyrocketed.

In a different world without predatory capitalism, I would've enjoyed being able to do this work the same way potters make mugs, as a personal craft and a pursuit of art. But these days more and more it seems that part of it is getting pushed out by the kind of development that only cares about profit and engagement. It's not what I want out of my career or my life, no matter how much it pays.