I joined in 2018.

Honestly it was 10 years too late. The big innovations of the 2010 era were maturing. I’ve spent my career maintaining and tweaking those, which does next to zero for your career development. It’s boring and bloated. On the bright side I’ve made a lot of money and have no issues getting jobs so far.

there’s always interesting work out there. It just doesn’t always align with ethical values, good salary, or work life balance. There’s always a trade off.

For example think of space x, Waymo, parts of US national defense, and the sciences (cancer research, climate science - analyzing satellite images, etc). They are doing novel work that’s certainly not boring!

I think you’re probably referring to excitement and cutting edge in consumer products? I agree that has been stale for a while.

I think my career started in 2008? That was a great time to start for the purpose of learning, but a terrible one for compensation. Basically nobody knew what they were doing, and software wasn’t the ticket to free money that it became later yet.

data engineering was free money for nothing at all circa 2014, they got paid about 1.5x a fullstack application developer for .5x the work because frontend/ui work was considered soft, unworthy

Don't worry, there is always another bubble on the horizon