Interesting. Do you have any articles about the oversupply of entry-level actuaries? Actuarial science was a career path I considered, but I ended up in systems/network/devops instead.

No, just a general sense. I think the career got publicized at a time when a lot of people were struggling to figure out what to do.

Annecdotal, but I've experience this personally. These rankings grossly neglect the availability of entry level jobs. And you end up studying a bunch of stuff that is borderline useless for any other career path on a practical level.

I consider trying to become an actuary one of the greatest mistakes and waste of time in my life.

When I switched to programming, it was like some kind of magical door opened and all of a sudden and the process of finding an entry level job was no longer the equivalent of banging my head against the wall, repeatedly.

Putting it in another perspective, perhaps that experience made you appreciate programming and software industry more. It might be a high price you paid (the years of pseudo useless studies), but you'll think twice when considering to change industries.

I worked in sales for a few years and even became a regional sales manager before switching to programming 12 years ago. Now, whenever I see the IT related problems (like bad programming parctices, lousy code, bad architectures and so on), I remember how bad and really unfixable things can be (for me as an employee) in the rest of the industries and love programming even more.

How long did it take you to complete the exams? I think I read a lot of actuaries actually finish them while on the job

Think it's possible to self study the exams? Not a likely path for me, but interested in seeing if anyone has done that

Most people get started before their first actuarial job, get a “student” position two to four exams in, and then finish up on the job. I had a math degree and three exams coming out of college and it took me about five years to finish the whole exam sequence. Self study is a viable option, but it helps to have the math and business background.

how much does it pay, as an FSA? I'm considering it as a backup to my dev career.

Self-study is entirely possible. I worked through about half of the P1 material as a way to strengthen my probability/stats background. It's a lot of hours of work to be able to pass it if you don't have good knowledge of it already though.