Can you share more of your story and maybe give me some advice, I really don't want to end up burnt out
I started uni at 19 (math & computer science at a local state university, I didn't have to go into debt for it) and that gave me a big boost in my programming ability (i continued working in that first job part-time throughout school). After that I went through several jobs in the next ±decade and made sure to always apply to places where I'd learn something new and level up as a developer.
At that point I knew a lot better what I wanted & didn't want to do. But I don't think I could have learned that without that experience and I don't regret it as it really helped me hone my skills and learn a lot. I also learned that the people you work with often make a bigger difference to the experience than the product you work on.
What I dislike is typically tied to all the bullshit that comes with programming. Because I’m mentally damaged the way I am, I have to expend an enormous amount of energy to pretend to listen in a daily standup meeting when people I don’t work directly with mill about whatever the code I’m not at all involved with does. Which is how SCRUM “works” in basically any Danish organisation because none of them have teams actually working on the same thing to justify using SCRUM. Or if you bill by the hour, so you can’t help another developer chase down that silly mistake that turns out to be ridiculously obvious because then how do you bill that half an hour in JIRA? Those things are what I personally look to avoid.
So yeah, if you’re not that into programming anything, then I guess it’s harder but it’s still possible. The first thing I did at my current job was to work with solar inverters and collect massive amounts of data from our solar plants. Which was certainly a challenge, I haven’t really read a manual the way I needed to read those solar inverter manuals since I did some silly stuff in C with BitMap images during my computer science education. So those jobs are also out there.