It's a balance, I'd say. At the moment, I'd willingly sacrifice some years of my life and potential earning power, but as time goes on, less so. If I were somewhat older, or even more older, I wouldn't do that at all. Don't want to be a junior for the majority of my career or risk not ever being able to retire. I'd think there's a difference between restarting at say 30 versus 40.
> You like certain areas of software dev better, but you aren't bringing yourself to writing code?
I wish I could explain this one, to be honest. As far as software development goes, my interests come and go very quickly, in a month, I may abandon what I'm interest in now. I'm actually recently off one of those cycles, during which I had intense interest, and many designs, but ultimately nothing to show for it.