I do enjoy looking at a screen and coding 8+ hours per day. Your current job, that's why they call it work. Legacy code is rough for everyone regardless of th

I do enjoy looking at a screen and coding 8+ hours per day. Your current job, that's why they call it work. Legacy code is rough for everyone regardless of their level of experience. You might want to ask if you can start rebuilding the legacy code so take an area and rewrite it. Maybe split your time 50/50 between legacy fixes and new code. Or even better is there a junior developer you could feed these legacy issues to and mentor him while you're working on greenfield or rewrite projects. 1. I haven't really burned out yet. I love being a developer, solving hard problems and learning new things. 2. If I start feeling tired of the grind I usually take a vacation or reduce my hours for a week, do more family stuff, meet up with friends, get outside. Then the next week I'm ready to go after it again. 3. Developer salaries have increased a lot even over the past 2 years. So it would be hard to leave and find something comparable. Right now is a good time to change jobs, demand is super high. Developer happiness is dependent on lots of things, codebase, project/company mission, culture, team, CTO/Manager. It's probably easier to change jobs than change most of these. Every place is going to be different. It sounds like you would be happier building new stuff so maybe try to either get on a greenfield project at your current company or stay gainfully employed and seek out your dream job/project at a new place and probably get a nice raise in the transition. One last thing, if you're self taught and worked as a consultant you might be working at a pace that's not expected in a company environment. This is an issue for me, I'm usually working/thinking at a really fast pace from when I worked as a consultant developer. In the company environment you can work at a more balanced pace and still exceed expectations. Side projects are about passion, if you're making more now than you used to and you don't want to code in the evenings, don't. You've worked hard to level up. Relax and enjoy. Good luck, keep on coding.