You should be worrying about plateau in your mind set long before you worry about the pay aspect. Yes we all need income of some sort. Start with living within your means, and then follow what interests you as best you can. Im 51 years old next week, started coding Portran and Basic at 13, worked as a dev, then did consulting, business operations work, started my own business in Hongkong, and now im a product manager of an American software company responsible for Asia Pacific. I could get paid more elsewhere but i love my job and the environment ( live in Guangzhou ).
You will get all sorts of advice about learn this, do that. Bottom line, know yourself well, especially what is deeply important to you as a person, and the rest will take care of itself. Spend time to ponder, have fun, try everything, stay optimistic, read widely.
Right now I get up at 05:30am every day to hack on Arduinos in C and Pythong and burning my fingers with soldering iron, and doing stuff to help my son on his PhD research into humanitarian logistics. 07:30 i down tools, breakfast and shower and go to my day job of ERP, global MNCs, C#, ABL, databases cloud this-and-that. Evenings i review and CTO on a system to help people collaborate worldwide. In between times im learning yoga. Colleagues amazed i do so much. The secret is that hackers/developers are blessed with a natural curiosity - when we learn to occasionally turn that on ourselves we can find that which motivates us, and then can follow that and have tons of fun.
You will get all sorts of advice about learn this, do that. Bottom line, know yourself well, especially what is deeply important to you as a person, and the rest will take care of itself. Spend time to ponder, have fun, try everything, stay optimistic, read widely.
Right now I get up at 05:30am every day to hack on Arduinos in C and Pythong and burning my fingers with soldering iron, and doing stuff to help my son on his PhD research into humanitarian logistics. 07:30 i down tools, breakfast and shower and go to my day job of ERP, global MNCs, C#, ABL, databases cloud this-and-that. Evenings i review and CTO on a system to help people collaborate worldwide. In between times im learning yoga. Colleagues amazed i do so much. The secret is that hackers/developers are blessed with a natural curiosity - when we learn to occasionally turn that on ourselves we can find that which motivates us, and then can follow that and have tons of fun.
Wish you well.