Comment by thfuran
>But I think there's a reason that there's a growing sect of people leaving to do everything from farming, woodwork, and even welding
I think that's pretty much entirely because the compensation is good enough that a lot of people can retire by fourty even without having planned for it. Many people in other office jobs find them tedious or get fed up with office politics or whatever but can't reasonably just decide to start farming instead.
This is not true for the vast majority of software engineers. It probably only applies to 2% of the total SE workforce that got lucky to be at FAANG or FAANG adjacent companies during a certain time period.