I think I escaped this because I got into tech fairly late. I dropped out of school, did windows desktop support, got tired of that, worked for a voip company, got tired of that, became a network engineer, got tired of that, went backpacking for three months, became a sysadmin, and almost immediately started shifting towards devops — at which point I hit the career lottery— something that I really enjoyed and also paid a lot of money. But I was already 36. So I’m 42 now and I absolutely love my job and have recruiters beating down my door. I imagine I won’t get burned out for five or six years and by then I’ll be ready for management.