I&#x27;m in a similar position.<p>I wanted desperately to get out of my last company, which was a very abusive environment. So I switched jobs and landed at a company that&#x27;s treated me better than any other employer I&#x27;ve had... except I&#x27;m now totally burned out on the work. It&#x27;s all academic&#x2F;research stuff, which I&#x27;m terrible at and have zero interest in, and it&#x27;s basically killed my interest in my job. I&#x27;m getting ready to start sending my resume out, but I have a strong feeling the burnout will just follow me wherever I go even if my next job has me working on systems&#x2F;infrastructure stuff again (which I worked on at my previous jobs and liked).<p>Also, over a year since I left my last job, I still have a lot of emotional scars left from the abusive way my last employer treated me.<p>Another thing that&#x27;s got me is my age. I&#x27;m 31, and I&#x27;m still working a fairly junior position. I actually don&#x27;t mind that. I have no career ambition, and as long as I&#x27;m making enough money to comfortably pay my bills, I couldn&#x27;t care less about chasing a higher salary. I&#x27;m content to work junior coding positions for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, as I get older, employers aren&#x27;t going to see it that way. They&#x27;re going to wonder why I haven&#x27;t advanced into a leadership role at my age, and I&#x27;m dreading the day I get asked that in an interview. It also means I can&#x27;t really talk about career stuff with my friends, because most of the CS people I went to college with are now in leadership roles or other senior technical positions, and I have much more in common with people who started college the year after I graduated (and I&#x27;ve done an absolutely terrible job of making new friends since graduating college, so most people I know are people I went to college with).<p>I have a feeling that if I wasn&#x27;t completely aromantic, I&#x27;d be happiest living like Mrs. Roberts from xkcd, as a housewife who still hacks on personal projects for fun.