I don't want to do anything where drivers or hardware keeps sucking the life out of me. I also don't want to do anything where I need to read a dozen spells into some cloud shell in order to get a hello world from an app running on sixteen different machines.
This sang to me, friend. Someone suggested consulting once, to me, and I see it quite a bit in forums where the topic of engineering malaise is brought up.
Problem for me is that puts me a few layers closer to the business types and represents the exact opposite direction I want to go in terms of day to day interactions. Not that I think they're bad folks, I understand they have a part to play in the business same as I do; it's just there's a massive misalignment between "the business" and myself as an engineer in terms of...I guess comparative levels of tolerance for bullshit?
Something, ain't it? Been doing this for 22 years, management for the last 8 and I still can't find a better way to put that.
I had a job like this my whole career. I’m describing the area I want to stay in :)
It's a shame the industry itself sucks. Take a look at EA-spouse and the latest crunch for Cyberpunk - it sucks all enthusiasm out of you.
I just want to code algorithms and data structures and solve hard domain problems. Not solve difficult programming and operations problems in order to deliver on what is often (at least superficially!) simple domain problems. I think that sweet spot is in games and desktop development.