One model of motivation is that you get motivated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose/belonging. I understand the 'mastery' bit is less about whether you can d

One model of motivation is that you get motivated with autonomy, mastery, and purpose/belonging. I understand the 'mastery' bit is less about whether you can do it (clearly you rate yourself well at that) so much as the feeling that you're improving at it. "just CRUD apps" suggests that you're not feeling you're mastering it, and that you don't feel like it's the best fit for what you're interested in doing. I think any professional task you can competently accomplish without having to learn anything is going to be boring. I think e.g. Scala, K8s are complicated enough that there's room for learning more about it. Not necessarily "do hard stuff for the sake of being interesting", so much as "being able to evaluate whether this is the best tool for the job".