Hah, this reminds me of myself. I worked at some good places and some not so good ones. At one point I worked at a place, and I thought I had it bad, so I left

Hah, this reminds me of myself. I worked at some good places and some not so good ones. At one point I worked at a place, and I thought I had it bad, so I left for something supposedly much better. Turns out, it was bad. Worse than my previous endeavors. I felt like I couldn't motivate myself to do anything. No one cared about the quality of the code, why should I? Never the less, I wrote good code, because that's what I believed in, but it still felt empty inside. I literally thought to myself "Maybe I'm getting tired of being a software engineer and I need to find something else to do" Then, I pulled up the source code for an old project I worked on. The best project I worked on. The code was beautiful! The project was complex, very involved, and fun. We had a great team that worked hard and solved difficult problems. And so it dawned on me that I was simply tired of working with people who didn't care and had the wrong motives for getting things done. This is a process that a lot of engineers / developers go through. Some realize it sooner than others. Some people just don't know better, because they've only had 1 or 2 jobs so they have no point of reference. And yes, working on anything with Java after experiencing Ruby on Rails is going to make you hate the damn language. But don't do it. Don't hate the language or the framework. Don't be a fanboy. Experience multiple languages and multiple frameworks, as you will see that each has a good use case. Some are better than others for web development. Some integrate better with certain tools. Don't be the smartest person in the room. Find a place where you can learn from people. Challenge yourself. Learn new frameworks and tools. Network and form long lasting relationships with colleagues. Build cool and fun things. Explore your creativity outside of work. Sooner than later, someone you know will reach out to you, because they value who you are.