I'm 33 year veteran of programming. I'm more or less 7 years from retirement. I've worked as a civil servant, at two startups, a large corporation, and for a three letter government agency. I made a decision early in my career not to move into management, but to advance to the "team lead" position at most.
I love and hate my job every day. I have no better time than when I am coding, but I hate frameworks pushed in lieu of design and architecture. I am a polyglot (C, Java, SQL, PL/SQL, XPath, JavaScript, XSLT, bash) and enjoy coding in all of them. I am looking to learn a few more (Python, Lua) giving the time. When a team pushes something like an ORM in order to be "pure Java" it makes me sad since it is seldom accompanied by rational comparison for design factors and true reasoning. I make a good living, well above average, since it is our industry that is driving the world economy. I believe it will continue to do so for some time. My personal motivation to do insanely great things is nearly expired. I have not the will to fight for better implementations with my current employment. I'm generally too tired at the end of the day to work on my personal projects, but not entirely. If it were not for the cut in pay, I would love to start teaching programming. Maybe I can do it part time after retirement.
In re-reading my text prior to posting, it seems like a description of burn out. Perhaps, but I am not unhappy, just unmotivated by the mundane nature of my work. I work to pay my bills and make it to retirement, not to change the world. I hope that whomever reads this can find both motivation and compensation. Good luck.
Easier said than done, but I believe you need to be in charge. This can take many forms, but I lean toward self employment creating a product the customers use as a black box.
Let me elaborate on the points of that last statement... "Self employment": I talking small company where you are in charge. Trying to be an entrepreneur in a large corporate setting or another founder's startup means that at the end of the day, they decide what is next, not you. "Customers use as a black box": Again, this is about who is in charge. If the customer is familiar with the inner workings or the possible features, they will leverage their investment in you to change priorities.
What does this mean? You need to find a way to produce a product that people will pay you for, and pay you enough to support yourself and others (depending upon the complexity of the product). As you can see, I value self determination above anything else (as far as work goes).
My motivation currently is fear of loss (albeit very little of it) of employment. I don't think that would change much if I were "self employed creating a product the customers use as a black box", but it would pivot much more closely to my choices than choices made for me.
I love and hate my job every day. I have no better time than when I am coding, but I hate frameworks pushed in lieu of design and architecture. I am a polyglot (C, Java, SQL, PL/SQL, XPath, JavaScript, XSLT, bash) and enjoy coding in all of them. I am looking to learn a few more (Python, Lua) giving the time. When a team pushes something like an ORM in order to be "pure Java" it makes me sad since it is seldom accompanied by rational comparison for design factors and true reasoning. I make a good living, well above average, since it is our industry that is driving the world economy. I believe it will continue to do so for some time. My personal motivation to do insanely great things is nearly expired. I have not the will to fight for better implementations with my current employment. I'm generally too tired at the end of the day to work on my personal projects, but not entirely. If it were not for the cut in pay, I would love to start teaching programming. Maybe I can do it part time after retirement.
In re-reading my text prior to posting, it seems like a description of burn out. Perhaps, but I am not unhappy, just unmotivated by the mundane nature of my work. I work to pay my bills and make it to retirement, not to change the world. I hope that whomever reads this can find both motivation and compensation. Good luck.