Oh boy this brought back a lot of memories! I started roughly the same time as you, but took a slightly different path. I programmed my first BASIC program when a friend's father bought a Commodore PET in the late 1970s (I was in middle school). Then my high school had a small PDP computer where I did more BASIC programming. I went to a large public university in the early 80s and go a computer science degree and worked for the Federal government doing DBASE III and then SQL Server programming. I moved to Seattle in the mid 1990s and went to work for Microsoft and eventually worked on SQL Server the product. That was the high point of my tech career. But in those days Microsoft was a burnout factory and I left in 2003 (after 18 years in IT work) to start a career completely unrelated to tech. That failed (the great recession killed it off) and I had to feed the family so back to IT in 2011 doing SQL Server programming and ran through a series of companies over the past 10 years. Now I am a senior data engineer at a very large company, not tech related.

I lost my passion for IT type work a couple of years after I came back when I realized I was never going back to the go go times of Microsoft. It was just work. The work was often boring and very easy. Even the difference between 2011 and now is tremendous. The specializations and the amount of knowledge you need just to get a job these days is nuts! I tried leaving my current job (It's a company everyone knows but it's boring IT Data Engineering work) but its very hard for a man in their 50s to land a new job. Nobody wants old people no matter how tech savvy you are. I studied and got certificates and upped my skills game. In the old days we didn't have to compete against the world for jobs, now H1Bs and offshoring is slowly sucking everything out of IT until you just have people managing people in India.

I tell young engineers that by the time you are my age, it's highly likely they will be burned out and not even in IT anymore. Keeping up with the current tech stack that changes almost monthly is a job in itself. When you get older, you just have so much more going on in life it's not worth it anymore. So, I am sticking around until retirement in a few years. I have kids college to pay for and need to save as much as I can for retirement. My advice is to steer clear of an IT career these days.