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That describes me exactly. Coincidentally, I turned 40 a few months ago. I took my current job with the goal of transitioning into a leadership role, either pr

That describes me exactly. Coincidentally, I turned 40 a few months ago. I took my current job with the goal of transitioning into a leadership role, either product or management. I was walking into a situation where I knew people already here and was hoping to leverage that. Those people left a few months after I started, and now I'm kind of stuck on an island. I've approached my current boss but he's completely uninterested in promoting any sort of career development. Bottom line is I'm burnt out, depressed, and bored out of my mind. The idea of learning Yet Another Web Framework fills me with dread (I'm currently doing Node/React stuff and hating it), not because I don't think I can learn the tech, but because it's no longer fulfilling in any kind of personal or professional sense. So, I really don't know where I'm going, or what I'm going to be when I grow up.

JimboOmega 9y ago
I know that feeling. A lot of times I feel like there is not career track after you hit "Senior Software Engineer", especially outside of super specialty tech. It feels like the only real track is management, and most places don't want to promote or change the management structure at all. It's honestly very hard to get excited about going from Senior Engineer to Staff or Principal or whatever the text title is. Nothing will change in terms of the job. Pay is pretty well pegged to what you started at with single-digit percentage increases every year or so. Skill wise? Learning new frameworks is just not as exciting as it used to be. Even then - the reality is that whether you're the most skilled dev in the world or a mediocre dev with only a 9 week bootcamp of experience, you're going to not understand the new environment you're dropped into when you start. It's full of weird quirks and historical oddities. It'll take time to understand those and get productive in whatever the particular stack is. All of which feels like... every time you start a new job, you're starting over. With a little more insight and vision, but fundamentally, doing the same thing over and over.

JimboOmega 9y ago

I know that feeling. A lot of times I feel like there is not career track after you hit "Senior Software Engineer", especially outside of super specialty tech. It feels like the only real track is management, and most places don't want to promote or change the management structure at all. It's honestly very hard to get excited about going from Senior Engineer to Staff or Principal or whatever the text title is. Nothing will change in terms of the job. Pay is pretty well pegged to what you started at with single-digit percentage increases every year or so. Skill wise? Learning new frameworks is just not as exciting as it used to be. Even then - the reality is that whether you're the most skilled dev in the world or a mediocre dev with only a 9 week bootcamp of experience, you're going to not understand the new environment you're dropped into when you start. It's full of weird quirks and historical oddities. It'll take time to understand those and get productive in whatever the particular stack is. All of which feels like... every time you start a new job, you're starting over. With a little more insight and vision, but fundamentally, doing the same thing over and over.