I learned to program because I wanted to make video games as a kid. I studied math because I got bored of programming. I worked as a programmer because I needed a job and it was the thing that paid the most among the things I was qualified to do (I actually thought I wanted to be a chef...). I went back to grad school because I thought programming apps was tedious and a dead end and wanted to get a job in research. I got a postdoc because I was pretty decent at it and liked what I was doing. I left academia to go do industrial R&D because academia was a dumpster fire and I needed more money and predictability for my family. I'm now writing niche numerical libraries for a small company because it's what I ended up intensely specializing in and I still like what I'm doing. I'm mixed on LLMs, but they're unavoidable. They've made some parts of my job easier, and they've made some parts harder. I still have to write a lot of code by hand because the LLM's code is often wrong.