Perhaps you are choosing shitty companies and are being approached by shitty companies as well. Work satisfaction is an important component of happiness, becaus

Perhaps you are choosing shitty companies and are being approached by shitty companies as well. Work satisfaction is an important component of happiness, because we spend a large percentage of our waking hours at work. Here are some suggestions for transitioning to a better job in software development: 1. Look for a workplace with smart colleagues, even if the product is a bit workaday. You will become a better engineer by working with people who are better than you. 2. Software development is done in many domains. If you are bored, it may be because you are bored of the domain. Change it up and go to someplace that's very different. For example, if you work in banking, you could move to a bio company. 3. Spend time on your own learning skills, whether they be programming languages, databases, web dev frameworks, or cloud native stacks. Doing small projects or even just reading and playing around with small examples while reading books can be a thing that you do every day or week to add some variety to your work. 4. Interview and change jobs more often. Always having options lined up is useful because you can move to another job. Nowadays the average tenure is barely more than two years. If you take 6 months to make the move and 6 months to settle into a job, you will be spending perhaps a year in productive, sometimes boring mode. It's terrible for the quality of the software that's produced, but you will solve your problem. If you move away to another line of work, chances are you will be compensated way less. As you grow older and accrue responsibilities such as kids, you will care more about providing for them, and being in software development is still a great way to provide for your family while securing your retirement etc. I'd think a lot before moving away from software dev, because it pays quite well. Even doing part-time work in a different area while doing software development (e.g., as a consultant) is better than moving away completely from software development.