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I can relate: I did a few years working for a local banking megacorp, it's a mature sector, many of the hard problems got solved decades ago and are wrapped inside vendor products. There's still an infinite amount of integration projects requiring software to be built, and an infinite amount of maintenance/rearchitecture/modernization projects, but e.g. you might go three projects shipping bespoke adaptor/integration things that sit between different vendor or cloud products and comply with all the NFRs and only write 1 line of business logic that's related to the problem domain. I've had other software jobs where the work was 20% data formats, 80% business logic + algorithms related to the problem domain, and 0% APIs/integration projects. That wasn't working for a banking megacorp, that was working for a small software product/consulting shop in a weird niche. Some ideas -- overfit from sample size of 1: - trying searching for jobs in companies that are qualitatively different from the company where you've been working. - if your current employer serves an industry that's relatively mature in its application of IT & software, you could try for a job in a company in an industry where use of computers and IT is much less widely adopted. - if you've been working somewhere medium-sized, you could aim for some place smaller where you're more likely to be wearing multiple hats and having more customer or client contact and immersion in the industry's problem domain. maybe you get more chance to solve real world problems that way, not IT problems. You could look for roles where they need people to learn the domain and build a product containing some serious application-specific logic -- but I guess, not well-understood-by-academia-serious-logic, as you might be competing against a bunch of well-credentialled grads/grad students for those specialties. There's potentially some career risk involved with these ideas -- you might find a job where work is much more interesting, but it might be in a smaller niche, or in smaller companies. In the extreme, if you end up specialized in a really interesting niche that's occupied by one employer, there's much less room to switch jobs if you end up with a difficult manager, or get a pay rise by switching jobs to somewhere else your expertise is valued, if negotiations with the current employer stall. |