You definitely sound like someone who's afraid to quit their first job and is doing everything in their power to convince themselves that they should. Honestly

You definitely sound like someone who's afraid to quit their first job and is doing everything in their power to convince themselves that they should. Honestly the things you're complaining about you'll find in varying degrees at jobs big and small, companies established and new, whatever. Your company is probably not as bad as you think, and you probably haven't become as unemployable as you think. But that's fine. You want to move on, by all means move on! Don't be afraid, and don't spend so much time trying to rationalize it... it's already rational. :) It's all about reframing yourself for the next opportunity. If the next place you want to work at is a Java shop, play up your Java experience, and spend some time at night making sure you're mostly airtight Java-wise. Not-invented-here is not a big deal. If you actually helped develop FrobbcoDHT versus simply using memcached, you can just say "Built proprietary DHT for x y z reason." It looks good on your resume. If anyone questions why something off the shelf was not used, you can either explain why something proprietary was necessary or that the company culture was not-invented-here and your manager/lead disallowed it. If you merely used FrobbcoDHT internally, just say that you have experience with DHTs in general. This isn't a big problem. Maybe it's also been a while since you interviewed anywhere? Apply for some random jobs as practice/reexposure. You'll probably get some offers and can reboost your confidence. I would just strongly advise you to stop focusing on your current employer so much. You have to play this mental game of "I hate it here it's ruining me my career is over" to give yourself the push to quit... but that's lowering your confidence, warping your sense of reality, and might make you come off as bitter/whining while interviewing. Just accept that you're going to leave, stop feeling the need to justify it, working on marketing yourself, work on honing a couple things depending on who you're going to talk to next, and try to work some confidence back up!