| Here's my advice on the same topic after living through burnout and "blah" several times: Make your job the union of what you're interested in and what is valuable to the business. You have to know what is valuable to the business; that knowledge is challenging to acquire but will _always_ help you in any role. It has to be true and verified with stakeholders, not your gut. There are soft skills involved here. You also have to know what you're interested in, which is also not easy after building CRUD apps for years. And you have to sell it — more soft skills. If you can — you can! — the result is a job description or project that you helped co-create, that you own in the most meaningful sense of the word, and that you're more excited to work on. The add on results is that you are more valuable to that specific company, and you've leveled up soft skills and business thinking that makes you more valuable to any company. I've done this consciously several times in at least 4 companies of various sizes. I've ended up building a new mobile architecture platform and library, a data warehouse and ETLT pipeline, multiple projects in languages I wanted to learn, new frameworks and libraries for various other industry-specific web dev things, and a few rewrites of legacy software. I still feel blah a lot of the time, and still think my path through this industry has been... non-optimized to say the least, but I have a path that helps me reengage when I have the energy for internal sales. |