[danurman]

For me, what helped was paying attention to what I liked about my work and leaning in a direction that emphasized those kinds of tasks - though it was kind of just luck that I found a job that let me do that.

I got my start in web development because I had picked it up as a hobby and (at least at the time) it was a good way to get reasonable money without a degree. But my favorite parts were learning new techniques/technologies (I started out without a team to steer me toward best practices so I did a lot of experimentation, self-teaching, and reinventing the wheel - probably made my projects take longer but meant I learned a lot more) and then using that expertise to help my colleagues (once I did have a team, my deeper understanding meant that I was the one to go to when something didn't work right in IE6 or something).

At one point, I was having dinner with a friend at his startup and happened to meet one of their product support engineers. She explained that the role involved becoming an expert in their highly-technical, fast-growing product and then using that expertise to help customers (internal and external ones). I realized that was an entire job made of my favorite parts of my previous job. I applied to join her team and I've happily worked in product support for tech startups ever since. Before this point I never would have considered product support, because I just had a stereotypical vision of it as sitting in a phone center reading from a script. The ideal field for you might be out there without you realizing it exists.

I still try to identify the things I like doing and spend more time doing those things. Sometimes that means spending time working with folks on other teams - not all companies are flexible enough to allow this, but I think healthy ones will because the added perspective usually will make you more valuable to the company as well. Making sure to have these varied experiences and keep learning new things has been a great way to keep up my engagement over time.

[exdsq]

I enjoyed support when I used to do it - I’m pretty sure my social skills suffered when I started working in isolation on dev tasks