Have you ever considered working technical support? As a lifelong generalist programmer, I never imagined I would work in a support role beyond what every programmer at a startup is expected to do, but I was persuaded to cross over by someone I greatly respect. That support team was the most talented team I ever worked with in almost twenty-five years in tech, and working in that role grew many different skills both in and out of tech in ways I never imagined. Hacking broken production environments back online and writing and pushing bugfixes is exhilarating, and it was the single most valuable experience of my career.

I once read about devs that get bored with long projects and thrill at starting new things, and the other kind that doesn't want to take new projects until the one that she/he is working on is "finished". Maybe you are the first kind and that's why you are enjoying the unexpected situations you face giving technical support.

Never considered support role to be honest. Maybe it feels a little inferior after having those degrees I guess but that’s my own bias. I did think of like a product management role at startups but they all expect you to have pedigree or previous work ex in similar role. Catch-22!

Yeah, that's exactly what I thought, too. It is just one of those weird cultural artifacts that when someone says "tech support" we automatically conjure this mental image which is both not really technical and not really flattering. It was definitely one of those life moments when I had to sit down and talk myself out of a baseless prejudice.

Also, the sibling commenter mentions one of the big reasons I found so much joy in it. This kind of hardcore technical support is in many respects closely related to working on greenfield projects. In my experience, the fun stuff usually ends up with some unfun caveats like company bureaucracy, office politics, or having the tech stack chosen beforehand, this kind of thing. But there's an interesting inversion when a company's production environment is broken and you're the one that can fix it. Obstacles magically disappear and you have a tremendous amount of freedom to do your job, with effectively two different companies doing what they can to enable your work, because the only thing everyone cares about is getting it working again.

You do have to be able to walk the walk -- and I cannot stress enough that it takes a certain type, and just knowing your shit isn't going to cut it -- and you also have to get some personal enjoyment out of chaotic environments, and be able to talk people out of a tree sometimes. But you'll never run out of new and interesting problems to solve, you'll be testing your mettle far more frequently than your peers, and you'll be expanding your professional network every week about as much as everybody else does once or twice a year when they go to a convention. It's the closest thing the tech industry has to a firefighter or superhero or something.

Maybe infosec or cyber security would be similar? I'm a fullstack turned mostly FE developer these days, but I'm very interested in security and it seems like there is a lot of demand out there for that skill set and plenty of opportunity. It seems like it would push a lot of the same buttons that you mentioned (fixing broken systems, lots of autonomy, working with smart folks). I tend to get bored with long-term projects unless there are still interesting problems to be solved so working on lots of smaller projects sounds pretty appealing, and there's seemingly no end to new systems/devices/websites that are just riddled with holes. Seems like a perfect role and potentially more lucrative than IT (although this is just pure guessing, I haven't compared numbers).

I have explored security world too. Lots of experiments with reversing tools like IDAPro, ollydbg.

Recently a client asked if I can help reverse their own android app because the developers were holding their source code hostage. It was lots of fun and lots of struggle but overall satisfying.

Maybe something like basic security freelance work especially basic webapp security(xss,sqli,csrf, the likes) and some process security with maintaining proper logins, maintaining and rotating credentials etc.

Thank you for your ideas.

Thank you for your insights. The firefighters analogy is definitely very refreshing take on a role which I didn’t consider much before. I’ll definitely explore opportunities on this front.

Maybe you’d enjoy software consulting work under a firm with good engineering management. You get to touch many different tools and tech depending on project.

the mythical 'full stack' engineer? or just sell the AL/ML snake oil and get hired to brute force tech debt.

There’s nothing mythical about it. Just have been doing this for a long time across different parts of the stack and few indie products under the belt. The newer javascript frameworks are a bit tricky to wrap your head around though.

your head is meant to fall into them like a box.... not wrap around it like a present, and in that understanding there is a solace in knowing that javascript is not "the way"

This is the way of beginners. The truth is, read the source code of these libraries. You'll realize a lot of stuff on SO is just copypasta work-arounds, while a more elegant, more efficient solution may exist that just wasn't documented well for your use case.

Perhaps a job at a medium size non-tech company. There are plenty of problems that can be solved with small scale (web) apps everywhere, that don't need webscale levels of scalability, but are well suited for a single full stack developer

I would love to I suppose. Sort of like a mini-cto/dev of a small non-tech company would be ideal. Tough to find such opportunities. Any ideas where?

Yeah, this sounds like an amazing job. I too would love to find this.

Easiest path for you:

Frontend/full stack agency developer (node/react).