Ask HN: How happy are you working as a programmer?

Ehhh, like a 7/10.. One of the many reasons I ended up applying to med school.

If you miss excitement, social connection, and orders of magnitude higher compensation cap in your life, while you still like coding, then I suggest you consider sales. Not just technical sales (though that gets your foot in the door), but eventually landing strategic sales accounts. It is pretty thrilling cold-calling people to establish your bona fides with a new customer; only a tiny fraction of the population finds it and public speaking (which you will also be called upon to perform in sales) not paralysis-inducing terrifying. You have to genuinely like people and be interested in them to really excel at sales. At the high-end of sales, where you lead sales organizations, sales-metric-based compensation plans will easily exceed that of nearly all programmers save the ones exiting unicorns with founder-level equity positions intact. You are constantly learning both technical and non-technical subject matter. There are grind-y parts, sure (every job has that), but I've never seen in sales the kind of grind programmers routinely endure.

Once you establish a successful sales record, you wield enormous influence upon product direction and implementation. If you keep your coding chops up to that point, then it is not inconceivable for you to be able to throw your weight around and pick and choose both what to code and actually implement it. Of course, if you aren't good at coding, then the engineering lead will continue to hate your guts. They will all hate your guts at first regardless of your skill level and ability to smoothly work with their teams, but if you are really, really good you can earn the respect of most after awhile.

Very good sales people who are still top 20% coders are an extremely rare combination. It would be difficult NOT to stand out in the crowd. That's good and bad.

The Great Filter in my suggestion is getting out and meeting people trying to connect with them. There are lots and lots of programmers, even "brogrammer"-types, who claim they are very extroverted, etc., who I find will freeze when faced with a list of contacts or a room of strangers and tasked with establishing connections. The vast majority of people, extroverted programmers included, are extroverted with people they know; it's human nature. Of those who can manage to overcome that nature, even fewer will come back with a systematic collection of facts and data about their contacts that you can work with as the start of a sales funnel. Of THAT population, even fewer will actually follow through the sales funnel. Out of THAT, anyone who can continue following up prospects and re-running them through a sales funnel under different campaigns is a unicorn. This is why sales is often broken up into pieces and parceled out to different people. But programmers possess a systems-thinking background that uniquely positions them to excel at sales if their personality really fits it.

I don't think I've ever faced any direct age discrimination, I'm just aware that there's no reason why anyone would hire me when they can have an enthusiastic 22 year old who's fresh out of uni.

I'm happy working as a programmer, I wouldn't have done it for the past 35 years if I didn't like it.