Interests change too. I had degrees in Mech E and material science and I drifted into computer hardware related product management in relatively early days. From there to being a tech industry analyst and from there to doing a fair bit of early-on cloud strategy and content marketing work. Back to doing sort of part-time analyst work.

I suspect a lot of people here have had more linear and well-defined paths as the industry has matured.

I don't consider any of it a waste and I've enjoyed a lot of it. I've had conversations with people I've known for decades about it and they're kind of meh. You've done fine whether or not your formal training was necessarily on target for what you ultimately did.

I'll also add that working on newspapers has been probably been more useful than a lot of the technical stuff I've done.