I started as a dev in a small software consultancy and worked there for 9+ years. I too felt the owner was too concerned to saying yes to every customer and con

I started as a dev in a small software consultancy and worked there for 9+ years. I too felt the owner was too concerned to saying yes to every customer and contract and gave short shrift to the technical side of the business. I also felt similarly oppressed by management. It's not always clear cut though - since running my own development company I've come to appreciate the difficulty of making payroll, of keeping the contracts coming in so that there's never a month where we're short and have nothing for our team to do. It's tough, certainly for you, but also for management too. Try and see both sides, I guarantee there are few bosses who are intentionally malignant, just unintentionally so! Regarding your skills stagnating, yes, that's partly on your employer for having a boring and crufty tech stack but it's also partly your responsibility. I spent close to a decade focusing exclusively on my employer's tech stack, it was pure JSP/Java 6 built around an old school asynchronous messaging engine. Whilst I am a proficient back end architect I ignored the world of HTTP, REST, Websockets and web development so by the time I left my employer and entered the job market I didn't even know what a HTTP verb was! It took 6 months of intensive crash courses and small side projects around the training to solidify the current web paradigm. That de-skilling was on me. It would've been great if my employer actively sent me on mentoring and training programs, etc. but even when I've contracted at super large companies they often pay short shrift to training in hot new skills and focus more on health/safety training and other corporate compliance. Your skills and qualifications are on you. As far as motivation and burnout goes, this one is a bummer. Towards the end of it I was literally having difficulty breathing whilst working for my previous employer. I found it impossible to get up before 10am and struggled to stay motivated. My health started to inexplicably fail and I was getting aches all over. I eventually found out I had symptoms of depression and to get out of it took a long time. I started by chipping away at simple things. Walk after dinner round the block, every day, non-negotiable. That morphed into daily exercise, which morphed into eating better, which gave me the energy to start weekend coding and training on the skills I was missing. It's still tough, I still miss workouts all-the-time and I still lapse into a funk - but it's good knowing the funk is temporary, that the mind plays tricks on itself and catastrophises or kids itself that the present situation will stretch into eternity. Everything is temporary, which is good because bad situations can turn into good situations. It takes time, don't be hard on yourself, or blame yourself. Recognizing that just as I had a hand to play in putting myself into a predicament so too I had a part to play in getting myself out of it. It takes baby steps and time. Good luck!