I don't have any advice, unfortunately, but I can offer words of empathy and say that I definitely relate to you.
And I've been at it for 25 years. Part of the problem is that for 15 of those 25 years I was full-time self-employed. It was immensely rewarding owning my own company and being self-sufficient. And I still own the business, it just wasn't making me enough to money and I started to lose my passion for what I was making.
I'm a maker. I like producing things whether it's wood-working, producing a magic act with my wife (which, when you're making everything from props to costumes involves a ton of DIY in all sorts of skills), producing music etc.
So for me, I care a lot about what I'm producing and how I'm producing it. I don't care too much about what programming language or "tech stack" I'm using, although I can't stand trend-driven software development. I'm all about choosing the right tool for the job and thinking about the self-life of the software I'm making. But it also matters to me what I'm making and the craftsmanship that goes into it.
The things that are burning me out in the industry are:
1) There is next to nothing being produced today that I care about at all. I don't play games, I hardly ever use my smart phone and I really hate SaaS and Cloud for the most part as a consumer. I'm a hacker, a tinkerer. I'm something of a contradiction because I like "high level" programming (Java vs C, frameworks vs ground-up) but I also like being close to my machine. As a programmer I'm supposed to be the master of the machine. I don't want to program for some Amazon service running on some VM in a foreign data centre. I want to code for a machine that I can touch. As an end user I want to own and control my software and hardware. I don't want to be constantly hitting some remote server and keeping all my data there. I want to control and own my computer. I want to touch it. I want to be able to customize all the software on it. I want to be able to use it completely offline / air-gapped if I want to.
2) I try to bring a sense of craftsmanship to my work that is under-appreciated by businesses. All they want is cheap labour who can get a rapid prototype out the door in time for "deadline" and then that rapid prototype becomes permanent, tech debt is ignored and the long-term consequences aren't realized by those who have cashed out, moved on and left those behind holding the bill.
3) Trend-based design decisions drive me crazy. Part of the problem is that we have a younger generation of engineers who only know what they know, and they need us old timers to teach them. But they have this attitude that "new = better, always." So we see Cloud-based everything complete with the vendor lock-in and complexity that using a million different proprietary weirdly named services employs, GraphQL as a solution for every problem, microservices where monoliths make more sense, monorepos where micro-repos make more sense etc. (But Google is doing it so it must be the best solution for every problem!)
I used to be a very high-tech person, relative to my peers. I was the kid who knew computers and spent every waking hour installing various *nix OS's to play with them, teaching himself to code, writing games (I don't play games anymore and the horror stories from the industry are enough to make me not want to go anywhere near it), starting tech businesses etc. These days when I clock-out of work I don't go near anything high-tech. I'm starting to appreciate the outdoors, producing things with old-fashioned skills. I can't stomach the idea of writing a single line of code when I'm not on the clock. It's really sad.
And I've been at it for 25 years. Part of the problem is that for 15 of those 25 years I was full-time self-employed. It was immensely rewarding owning my own company and being self-sufficient. And I still own the business, it just wasn't making me enough to money and I started to lose my passion for what I was making.
I'm a maker. I like producing things whether it's wood-working, producing a magic act with my wife (which, when you're making everything from props to costumes involves a ton of DIY in all sorts of skills), producing music etc.
So for me, I care a lot about what I'm producing and how I'm producing it. I don't care too much about what programming language or "tech stack" I'm using, although I can't stand trend-driven software development. I'm all about choosing the right tool for the job and thinking about the self-life of the software I'm making. But it also matters to me what I'm making and the craftsmanship that goes into it.
The things that are burning me out in the industry are:
1) There is next to nothing being produced today that I care about at all. I don't play games, I hardly ever use my smart phone and I really hate SaaS and Cloud for the most part as a consumer. I'm a hacker, a tinkerer. I'm something of a contradiction because I like "high level" programming (Java vs C, frameworks vs ground-up) but I also like being close to my machine. As a programmer I'm supposed to be the master of the machine. I don't want to program for some Amazon service running on some VM in a foreign data centre. I want to code for a machine that I can touch. As an end user I want to own and control my software and hardware. I don't want to be constantly hitting some remote server and keeping all my data there. I want to control and own my computer. I want to touch it. I want to be able to customize all the software on it. I want to be able to use it completely offline / air-gapped if I want to.
2) I try to bring a sense of craftsmanship to my work that is under-appreciated by businesses. All they want is cheap labour who can get a rapid prototype out the door in time for "deadline" and then that rapid prototype becomes permanent, tech debt is ignored and the long-term consequences aren't realized by those who have cashed out, moved on and left those behind holding the bill.
3) Trend-based design decisions drive me crazy. Part of the problem is that we have a younger generation of engineers who only know what they know, and they need us old timers to teach them. But they have this attitude that "new = better, always." So we see Cloud-based everything complete with the vendor lock-in and complexity that using a million different proprietary weirdly named services employs, GraphQL as a solution for every problem, microservices where monoliths make more sense, monorepos where micro-repos make more sense etc. (But Google is doing it so it must be the best solution for every problem!)
I used to be a very high-tech person, relative to my peers. I was the kid who knew computers and spent every waking hour installing various *nix OS's to play with them, teaching himself to code, writing games (I don't play games anymore and the horror stories from the industry are enough to make me not want to go anywhere near it), starting tech businesses etc. These days when I clock-out of work I don't go near anything high-tech. I'm starting to appreciate the outdoors, producing things with old-fashioned skills. I can't stomach the idea of writing a single line of code when I'm not on the clock. It's really sad.