What are people's plan Bs for when it goes tits up? I reckon I'd make a good electrician or something like that, but it's a real, grown up profession and I would have to get qualified.

Repairing classic cars.

We could arrive at the technical singularity and come up with 8000 IQ robots that can do things in a clean room but in the messy physical reality? I believe they will fail to catch up forever.

They will fail to deal with a stripped bolt head deep inside an engine bay that's been exposed to 40 years of road salt, that needs to be hit right with a 10lb hammer and a home made chisel until shit knocks loose, combined with cutting, welding, drilling, torching, tapping, impromptu redneck engineering, cursing, the use of 8 different kinds of penetrating lubricants, the acquisition of weird and highly model-year specific parts in a junkyard 500 miles away, realizing it's all wrong and doing it again.

Multiply the complexity by 100 times and that's what it's like to take on a classic car project.

Why don't those developers just learn to mine coal?

I think that's a very good plan FWIW. I'm going to consider cabinetry which I predict will be a semi-retirement in terms of income

That's funny, I'm also thinking about Electrician.

Games are a weird sector. Long term I simply want to go it indie. Even if I doesn't pan out, it's some kind of passive income and I have something to show to that is fully "mine" (so no ambiguity about how much I really contributed at BigCo.).

Short term I'm freelancing and doing whatever else I can find to get by. Hoping for one more full time role before I start my self published ventures.