[NathanKP]

putting together CRUD apps and laying out contact forms

That's the problem. If that's all you are doing 90% of the time after ten years it's time to move on to a different company.

Once a company gets large and has numerous engineers it tends to settle down into a environment where people have set roles as engineers where they work on simple boring projects.

But when you are building something from scratch in a small startup team you'll often have a more flexible role where you are writing core code, solving scaling problems, configuring servers and load balancers, tuning database queries, and numerous other things. From day to day you are learning new technologies and coding new things all the time.

That's what keeps software engineering fresh and enjoyable for me.

[greyfade]

> That's the problem. If that's all you are doing 90% of the time after ten years it's time to move on to a different company.

Trouble is, 90% of the time, it's very difficult to find an opening at a company that does more interesting things. :(