Funny, but I took only a few jobs where coding was more than 50% of my day job, but for the most part I've held very eclectic jobs in a predominantly technical or artistic career.

I was reading about neural networks and genetic algorithms in the late 80s and programming in Lisp and C. Mark Watson's book (he's on HN)

"Common Lisp Modules: Artificial Intelligence in the Era of Neural Networks and Chaos Theory"

got me started in coding them rather than just reading the more academic tomes I read in the late 80s.

I am glad I didn't just focus on that then, although, I'd probably have more of a savings now and higher salary.
But not the adventures I managed to have by meeting people in all different types of jobs. And there's something about physical labor that calms me. Sitting at a desk all day seems so antithetical to actually living a life out in the real world and feeling the earth between your toes, the sun and wind on your body while taking in the green things around you!

I was dumpster diving and taking stepper motors out of dot matrix printers in the early 90s down on Wall street while working a 12 to 9 shift taking care of a VAX/VMS and Banyan Vines PC network for an environmental law firm. I used to write reports in Paradox, work on Concordance - a document management system - BRS search routines and queries. I used the steppers for my amateur robotics influenced by Rodney Brooks' subsumption architecture and Mark Tilden's BEAM stuff. I played Doom for the first time at that job!

I was an art handler (Brooklyn Museum), paintings conservator's assistant, 3D FX and animation on SGI intern using Prisms (now Houdini) at a NYC Ad agency/FX company, welder, machinist, CNC coder, technical diver and ropework technician (think IRATA/SPRAT), among the memorable items. I remember being one of the early funders for getting Blender3D open sourced way back when (2001/02), and writing a Python script to turn photos into wooden carvings back in 2002/03 with it on my CNC table. The software was based upon a paper by NASA about 'Shape from Shading'. it alsow churned out G-code for our table after downloading the client's file, and gave me an estimate of machine time and overall cost. This is before 3D printers, and tables used to be in the 6 figures, but this was an $8k 4 ft x 8 ft router table. My partner and I used it to cut out kayak designs we made out of 4 mm Okume plywood and the carvings I did in solid maple in bas relief. We did some urns for pets and pet cemeteries (really! http://thewoodenimage.com. Used to come up on the Wayback Machine without pics or other content). Sad to say, people loved our carvings at boat shows, etc., but nobody bought them. We had crowds at our table, but not a single purchase. Funny cemeteries were our market, and a gentlemen offered me money for the software to make bronze tombstone plaques from family photos!

I worked at a company as a sys admin, and did some coding in C, C#, Java, but mainly my strength was writing front ends for old Italian sheet metal punch machines and translating modern G-code into the 'Octo' machines' proprietary code. This was in C. Putting a temperature sensor in the server room, and have it ping a pager of me and the other sys admins.

I did Christmas display window animations for a display company in NYC as a welder and later as the head of their creative technologies. One Christmas (1996-7?). We had pneumatically operated 4 to 5 ft high Nutcrackers whose arms would go up with a bell in it if a child touched the window where there were five large buttons painted on the back of the window with a capacitive sensor behind it, a BasicStamp (think today's Arduino) running it, queuing the music and triggering the pneumatic valves. Remember right up until this, the internet and information from companies was not as accessible. I had to write letters, emails, and phone call for weeks.

I will probably never retire. I just put a deposit down on a live/work space to use my desktop cnc mill/lathe, 3D printer and electronics equipment (a CNC sewing/embroidery machine too).

I currently work at an engineering firm that specializes in stage machinery and anything entertainment-related. Because I don't code full-time for a living, I code up things in what works best for me and the company I work for. I write them in C, python, factor, J, forth, assembler (micros), and I play with a lot more PLs (Zig, Rust, Haskell, R/RStudio), but I am mainly sticking with C and J for now with Zig as a cross compiler. I avoid python, not because it isn't good or I don't like it, but it doesn't fit in with my preference for terseness and shedding bloat. I am having a renewed interest in C and assembler. I am getting older for some of the more physical work I did, so I am now coding more to try and see if I can make something of it.

I was working in Macau for 6-plus years for the The House of Dancing Water show up until the end of 2015. I have hundreds of technical dives working on hydraulics, air FX, and electrical systems under water. It is almost 10 m deep and was the world's largest commercial indoor pool!

Programming is not so much a career for me as it is simply a tool. The same for my electronics and metalworking experience, or any other skill. Critical thinking, problem solving, and knowing how to provide what's needed or desired are more important. I've always followed my heart or gut on what's next and it is landed me in a good place at my age. Follow your bliss to quote Joseph Campbell!

[1] https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4612-3186-8