I went through this myself. I was a 15 year JS/TS developer who had been doing web work even longer than that in my mid 40s. I changed careers last year. It felt like starting over but it was completely worth it.
My long time painful observations:
For the longest time the corporate web business back was dominated by Java. Some of the people doing that work were incredible engineers but many were not. Many of the people were praying, some still do, that Web Assembly would replace JavaScript because it scared the shit out them. It was both sad and incompetent. You couldn’t talk about this because it made people wildly emotional.
Observation two is that JS people were just as fearful and emotional, perhaps much more so, but about almost everything. Many of these people were expert beginners who built a career based on complex nonsense because many of them never really learned to program and would supplement their practical deficits with stacks of tools, frameworks, abstractions, and so forth. Again, you couldn’t rationally talk to people about this without them becoming hyper emotional because it destroys a persons definition of worth and credibility.
The best thing that happened to me was being laid off and waiting for something different.
My long time painful observations:
For the longest time the corporate web business back was dominated by Java. Some of the people doing that work were incredible engineers but many were not. Many of the people were praying, some still do, that Web Assembly would replace JavaScript because it scared the shit out them. It was both sad and incompetent. You couldn’t talk about this because it made people wildly emotional.
Observation two is that JS people were just as fearful and emotional, perhaps much more so, but about almost everything. Many of these people were expert beginners who built a career based on complex nonsense because many of them never really learned to program and would supplement their practical deficits with stacks of tools, frameworks, abstractions, and so forth. Again, you couldn’t rationally talk to people about this without them becoming hyper emotional because it destroys a persons definition of worth and credibility.
The best thing that happened to me was being laid off and waiting for something different.