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I'll pile on to the burnout suggestion with my own personal solution to how I fixed that problem.

I'm early 40s, started coding around 13 or so, so it's been 30 years of software for me. About ten years ago after living in the web programming world for a few years I got kind of the same feeling you have. I missed my forms and windows app development, so I went to another company doing what I remembered enjoying.

You can guess what happened next. I hated it. I remembered all the things that annoyed me about windows app development, and realized I was just tired of coding every day. Coding has never been what I like about coding, it's building things that do things. I started focusing more on the building side, this time with the team around me, and also just some non coding fun projects like learning auto mechanics, etc. I drifted into a management role by accident and found a ton of fulfillment in coaching and mentoring. After a while I started to miss the coding side, so I went into an architecture role where I still got to do coding but it was mostly exploratory POC stuff to decide on new technologies or not. I took a role after that as a principal engineer, and while these are all mostly just title changes, it gave me enough variety to be exciting again.

Today I tell prospective employers that I am someone that drifts between IC and leadership roles. I believe experience in both helps both. My drive waxes and wanes but I think that's totally normal for humans. I just came to terms with it and stopped worrying about it, and now I'm very satisfied in my career.



Thanks for sharing. I've been in the "wane" stage recently and your story gave me some things to consider.


Just remember the golden rule about advice (this advice included) is that it's all relative to one's own personal circumstance. What may work for me may not for you and that doesn't mean you're doing anything wrong or there's anything wrong with you or your approach.

If we could solve problems like motivation, drive, and perspective with a wiki or a readme.md file, we'd all have it bookmarked. Life's a learning experience, and unfortunately we all need different curriculum.




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