[tarsinge]

Regarding the landscape my explanation is that it hasn't really changed: the kind of companies driven by hacker ethos were a very tiny part in the 90's, the most part of the industry was enterprise software development. The catch is that nowadays companies are so good at marketing that most engineers fail to see that most SaaS companies are just the new incarnation of the same corporate MBA/sales driven world that existed before. In Office Space or in Neo's software company in the Matrix how were treated engineers? What were their expectations, were they thinking they were changing the world? A lot of dissatisfaction nowadays seems to come from that dissonance of what we think/are selled we do, vs what we really do. It helps to picture the typical front-end dev job as what would have been done with J2EE a few years ago in an enterprise setting. Technology and fashion has changed, but not the core of the industry and the enterprise world.

Edit: also to more specifically answer your question, I'm about the same age, and what I do is take any hacking/fun driven activities outside financial constraints (i.e. hobbies). Game development, learning niche languages, anything becomes possible to explore with freedom. I also started my own business, but I'm not sure it would suit you because it's the same game, except if like me you see entrepreneurship as hacking (just be aware the hardest problems will usually not be solved with code).