You go down to the bottom of the pay scale every time you change career. If that means you won’t be able to afford your current lifestyle, then unless you have a good reason for walking away from that career, that’s going to make you unhappy.

That's assuming you have no transferrable skills from one career to the next and that there's a well-mapped career path in existence for a given role.

What about new careers that suddenly pop into existence around nascent technologies like AI?

I've transferred into product management now that enough companies officially recognise it as a career. I had been doing it in various guises for years where it was called 'project designer', 'project manager' or 'programme manager'.

Regardless of title, the common theme has been aligning business needs and engineering needs to deliver customer value they're willing to pay for. That meant I didn't start at the bottom when 'moving career'.