Having my first job in a consulting company. I worked on many projects, many customers, many markets. I developed an encyclopedic knowledge and I noticed the difference with developers of customers that did only one thing for years.

Anyway it's only a matter of personal satisfaction. I liked that kind of professional life. Salary is totally unrelated.

I co-founded a startup. Trite, I know, but the skills I learnt going from zero to one, talking to customers, relying on no-one else and owning all the tech decisions (I had a non-technical co-founder), and the community it forced me to build--those were all priceless.

+1 Even though the startup didn’t work out (solo founder), I learned in 1.5 what I wouldn’t learn in 10 years.

Rejecting the NSA pre-Snowden to design privacy enhancing technologies.

Actually, in a fiscal sense this hasn't worked out well... but at least I can sleep at night.

Never learned how to code. Those who did were always the subordinates, not-getting-laid, not deciding factors etc. within the companies that I observed through indipendent discovery and of course during the various organized visits to companies that we did during college.

Now with vibe-coding my choice has been vindicated.

On the other hand I have Spanish, Italian and a bit of Portuguese under my belt and contrary to coding no matter how much technology and AI advances... real time translators that will be developed will always look uncanny in the eyes of an other human.