>Another colleague got a job at 36 as a bare programmer after a very successful PhD where he wrote books and was invited to conferences.

I can relate, as this basically describes me - though I've been lucky enough to find bare programing jobs that I quite like doing.

One of the toughest things about leaving academia is discovering that (i) no-one who doesn't have a PhD has any clue what a PhD is and (ii) everyone who has a PhD has a healthy disregard for the intellectual capacities of their fellow doctors.