Do you ever feel like you've had enough of working in the IT industry?

I'm in a similar, but slightly different place. I've been in technology roles for 28 years. I've been at my current company for the large majority of those years. For me it's not the technology that I've lost interest in, but all the other parts. The political squabbles, the red tape, the broken processes, and the lack of competency in general. If I could just concentrate on the technology, and deliver great products, I'd be in a much happier place.

I believe a significant part of my problem is that all those things I'm not a fan of come with the seniority I have. I'd be happier, work-wise, as a junior dev without those responsibilities. My lifestyle, unfortunately, doesn't support such a move.

I've found that the further away I get from "hacky, simple, works" scripts that wow the uninformed the less I enjoy my work.

I wrote a Greenhouse bookmarklet for our Head of People a while back. All it did was click buttons, poll the page for content, and copy/paste some text. It took me two hours. It was such a magical experience hopping on a call, demoing the bookmarklet, and being told I'd saved someone tens of hours.

In contrast, I spent the last few months building out a greenfield, microservice architecture that product wanted in anticipation of a new feature that was going to need to scale to the moon. It was a real technical challenge but, in the end, business needs changed and it never saw the light of day.

I know that when I first got into programming - I didn't know all the complex stuff. I just saw things in the world I wanted to affect with programming - and then did. Over time, I learned to tolerate all the BS that gets in the way of making magic happen in exchange for an ever-growing paycheck. Each step along the way made sense, but, upon reflection, the magic has been incrementally bled out from my passion all in an attempt to best utilize my abilities.

Consider building something simple for a non-techy friend who needs some help. You might be able to catch sight of the magic you feel you've lost by looking into their eyes as you deliver what you've made.

I realized I didn't hate the industry or the work, I hated the people. So I got out of "real tech" and got into the tech side of the kind of industry that tech industry people seem to think is quite evil, Wall Street. And sure, I'm probably not making the world a better place but at least theres plausible deniability. When I worked in real tech it was pretty obvious that unless I adopted a very specific set of beliefs (loosely summarized as "naive tech optimism") I was making the world a worse place. I'm happy mostly not having to deal with the kind of people I had to deal with in tech.

Curious how you "fixed" your cognition and energy levels?

yup. imho, the high salaries we receive is a combination of both talent and willingness to do this rather unsatisfying work for long periods of time.

If this paid as much as say, brick layer, I would rather have been the brick layer.