Glad and sad to hear that someone is facing the exact same problems I've had in the past. There are several underlying problems in your situation. It took me a

Glad and sad to hear that someone is facing the exact same problems I've had in the past. There are several underlying problems in your situation. It took me a while to find out about all of this. Though now I have a clear vision of the problems. In 2017: 1. Software Development is not fun anymore. It used to be 10 years ago... today it's all about how many resources a company can utilize to implement a solution that has already been defined. All it needs is a set of arms and legs. No more creativity in software development, you don't use your brain. 2. Companies evaluate and hire software engineers based on CS principles (big-O and all the crap we learn at school). In real life, it's all about code architecture, integration, modularity, maintainability, etc. Software Engineers (because of companies like Google) are not operational anymore. Which means, there's no code quality anymore and products go out of the door full of bugs, poorly implemented. Look at iOS and OS X today. It feels like Windows Vista. %80 of your job as an engineer today is to fix all the mess (bugs) versus %20 new features. 3. Companies do not spend any effort in selecting their interviewers. You might come out of FB, google, etc. then get rejected by a small company after the first round because the interviewer asked you something way too specific. Like a bug he or she ran into one day, spent 3 weeks to fix it, thinking it would make the perfect problem for a 30 minute phone interview. If you get the solution in 30 minutes you pass, if not, you're not the right fit for this position. That makes sense right? Hell no.. And that's when you're lucky enough! Someone can ask you to write a program that rotates a matrix in a notepad, using a correct language syntax in 30 minutes. If you don't deliver you're out. So, because of these 3 underlying problems, people can end up in your situation fairly quickly. This is 2017 and it's getting worse everyday. So the solution is to run away from coding... let the "machines" do it for you. Act now and jump into another field.