If I may add something: I became dissatisfied with "IT as an industry" in the sense that, despite where I was working (a tiny shop, with tiny projects, flyover state, nothing is ever going to go viral or hit big), some people were apparently prepping for FAANG careers and generally trying to turn things into some Agile megashop with dozens of layers of technology, on and on, for some rinky-dink projects. I liked doing the rinky-dink projects but all of the overhead of play-acting like we needed to scale like Cloudflare was wearying.

I took up with some TechShop stuff -- before it folded -- and enjoyed my work on laser engravers, and the CNC machines, and the lathes, and whatnot. My educational background and IT experience were certainly a help, and I thought, "Dang, it sure is nice to construct a physical object at the end of the day instead of an arrangement of magnetic fields that will simply be blown away when some high muckety-muck notices whatever fad has changed."

I jumped ship for something adjacent where I use my IT skill constantly. Programming wasn't in the job description, but my ability to program brings a certain level of power. All of my decades of IT experience is very helpful here and I still feel like I am doing something with an actual concrete output and utility.

So, I sympathize with the urge to pull the ripcord on some kind of jetpack and blast far away into the sky, but there are plenty of places that are not what HackerNews thinks of when they think IT that need all of your skills. Perhaps I like being a medium-sized fish in a smaller pond, it could be that, but it does feel fairly nice.