| I, thankfully, ran into this problem when I was 28 and I'll just let you know my journey. The thing that I realized about my career is that the _people_ I was working with where "dead end people." They basically followed what society was telling them to do. If Google/Facebook/Redhat engineers invented some tech (today Google/Amazon/Microsoft), our team was just re-implementing it 5-10 years later. When I realized it was the people I had a decision to make — Try and change the people I work with or move myself to an area where people were still excited about the future. I moved to Silicon Valley and have never looked back. I've been programming since I was in high school (started on TI-81 in 1996), I'll be 40 this year and I still LOVE LOVE programming. BUT the only reason I do love it is because I've reached a level of mastery where I pretty much get to choose what projects I work on and the _people_ I work with. Steve Jobs said something back in the 90's that Ive heard other say about the variance in skills of developers vs other jobs[1]. You're burned out because you're working with low quality people and it's way easier to move yourself to an ecosystem where people are more excited about the future than it is to change your peers. (P. T. Barnum also says something similar to this in Art Of Money Getting, published in 1880 [2]) Also, contrarian advice — almost every one of my friends has switched to a manager track. I'm currently in the process of building my own company and most of them can't provide any value at this early stage. They don't read anything on how to become effective managers, they aren't socializing in any communities, they aren't attending any conferences on people management, not reading any books as life long learners, they say things like "I'm technical" and "I know enough to be dangerous", but they can't materially contribute to helping me build my product outside of testing and light UI feedback. So my two things would be: 1. Move to a better environment (Doesn't have to be SV but some place where there is a community passionate about things you are).
2. If you're going to eject out of coding, eject to an owner, not to an employee.
[1] - http://www.geekmind.net/2012/07/steve-jobs-on-average-vs-bes...[2] - https://www.gutenberg.org/files/8581/8581-h/8581-h.htm#link2... |