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

I'd consider 20 years a good run and then move to something else. That excitement could still be in technology though. You could try digital art of some kind (2D or 3D) or get into hardware or embedded development. Maybe you need to find an unknown-to-you software niche and deep dive into the state of the art and start putting things together. Business software produces endless ennui because most of us aren't stakeholders and won't get early retirement money for putting in long hours, so maybe that kind of direct benefit can revive passions.

You're absolutely right - the pure excitement that I felt at the beginning was mainly because I could do all the hacky, simple things. Nowadays you have to write 3 million tests before you can write any real code. I just feel like the red tape involved in doing anything is ridiculous.

I mean, I don't want to completely dismiss testing, but it was a big part of the reason I started moving away from development, and more into the DevOps realm. The other big problem is working for medium/large companies, which require so much administrative overhead to get anything done.

I love programming, but man I'm tired of software development.I want to build MVPs that work 95% of the time and let someone else handle the rest...

Yes! I feel like we used to be the good guys, but we've become the bad guys. I used to be proud of all the change we were providing for society. I used to preach to family/friends all the time:

- Find and purchase products on the web that you never had access to in your small town. Easy as clicking a mouse.

- Find directions to your destination, and even be guided how to get there in real-time. No more fumbling with the Thomas Guide.

- Connect with old family/friends easily. Or, easily make new connections with people in your home town or across the globe.

- Access new music, or old favorites, with the click of a mouse. No need to buy a CD just to listen to one song.

- Online banking! You no longer need to go stand in line at the ATM just to transfer money from your savings account to your checking account. And no more need to write a check each month to pay your bills, it can be automated now!

...and so on over the last 25 years. I used to love evangelizing the stuff we were creating, because I believed in it. But now I feel myself warning family/friends to avoid us:

- Don't use Evil Corp's social media service because they're gonna bombard you with misinformation and negative/combative content, just to drive engagement. You'll end up hating your family/friends.

- Don't get an Alexa or a Ring because they're basically spying on you. If you wanna be creeped out, read this: https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/whoops-amazon-alexa-user-a...

- Your smart phone knows where you are at all times, where you're going, and who you're with.

- All your financial data is being sold to marketers who wanna sell you more credit (credit cards to mortgages).

...and so on. Maybe it's me, like I'm just paranoid because I'm older now. But yeah, I feel similar about what we do these days.

I've been in the web development industry for roughly 17 years and loved most of it until Agile took over.

Now everything is reduced to ticking off tasks and almost zero room for creativity. Meetings after meetings. Overcomplicated development workflows, or really just everything is overcomplicated. Twenty people to do the job of two, checkups, check-ins, checkouts, checkboxes. Gratuitous positivity makes any genuine gratitude hollow and meaningless.

I've taken the last two years off aside from a little bit of contracting to pay the bills and serves to remind me of how awful it's become. The only times I'm happy is when I can work on weekends or holidays and no one will be pinging me haha.