Nah, the money only goes so far. I've been doing SWE professionally since '07, and that wasn't in the US, so there was far, far, far less comp involved. The trend I see with new grads is that they're driven and drawn to the space for whatever reason (money, etc), but most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc) or just go back to complete a professional degree (law, MBA, etc) or PhD.
16 years isn't a whole lot of time in the field, but it's enough to have watched the expectations of SWE roles expand, and the demands of dumping ops ontop of an already complex job do take their tole. My original comment was tongue in cheek, but late night fixes, pages, opsing, ontop of day to day development is a recipe for burnout when you add partners and kids into the mix.
> most abandon programming proper rapidly - I'd hazard within 3 years - and
> go on to other tertiary fields (PM, DevOps, SRE, etc)
SRE is a specialized subfield of programming. Someone has to write and debug all those low-level tools (runc, systemd, etcd) that sit "below" what most people consider to be the backend stack.
If someone becomes an SRE because they don't like programming, they're going to be in for a big surprise when they discover how much quality time they're about to share with the unshare(2) manpage.
