I made the switch over to “customer facing tech savvy person.” Think Sales Engineer, Solutions Architect, Technical Account Manager.
Pays slightly less (until you get 5+ years experience, then tends to catch up if you’re good) but my lord it’s so much less taxing on your brain.
You’ll realize that most customer facing folks may be charismatic, but they aren’t very organized or willing to learn on the job. It’s easy to be top 1% while coming in at 9 and leaving at 5, with plenty of time and mental energy leftover for whatever hobbies you want to pursue. Including programming.
Worth checking out if you feel comfortable communicating verbally for a living.
If you want to chat, feel free to reach out at evan dot hellmuth at gmail dot com
I like her because she writes code for a living AND has worked at quantum computing startups, and went to postgrad for quantum, so she can go really deep on both areas and their intersection.
She's also on Twitter https://twitter.com/amarchenkova