Ditto. I left Google in January, extremely burned out after 7 years. I'm taking some time off to let that settle down and to rediscover my love of software. It'

Ditto. I left Google in January, extremely burned out after 7 years. I'm taking some time off to let that settle down and to rediscover my love of software. It's coming back, but slowly. I find myself in a similar boat to the poster. When I joined Google the world was trying to figure out how to run cloud applications. NodeJS, no-SQL and other new server technologies were relatively new; we didn't have good patterns, tools or libraries for rich web client development, and mobile development was just getting going. There was a lot going on in pure software. But then I joined the insular (and relatively advanced) world of GOOG, during which it seems the outside world has figured out a good amount of how to do large server applications, the client frameworks are getting decent and mobile is very mature. So I'm not sure what the big, new, interesting problem spaces are but it seems like we're near the end of a technology cycle. This feeling could just be me. I'm a pretty experienced engineer at this point and have seen a lot. I've done late-90s LAMP stack development, PC desktop development, early rich web development (my startup built a collaborative browser-based video editor in 2014) and then within GOOG saw and touched a ton of stuff. Maybe because I've seen so much my bar for "what's interesting" is a lot higher than it used to be? Either way, I still find myself asking: what's the next cycle? - Is AR/VR going to really stick this time and be a big thing with lots of interesting problems and products? - Is ML going to result in some really killer apps that aren't just iterative improvements on current stuff? - Is anything in Crypto non-BS? This space seems to have sucked a lot of air out of the room, but there SO MUCH NOISE it's hard to know if there's anything really there. - Have we hit peak pure software and the really interesting stuff from here on out is software applied to atoms? Eg. automation, robotics, etc.?