Comment by ChiperSoft

It probably isn’t burnout, but if you keep pushing against it then you will burnout.

I felt the exact same way in pretty much the same timeline, and then burned out hard last year from trying to force myself to work when all the joy had already fled.

Personally, I think it’s a systemic problem with the industry as a whole, which has been made even worse by the rapid pivot towards LLMs. Somewhere around 2018 I realized that I don’t actually like writing software for other people any more. The projects no longer excite or challenge me, it’s just more of the same.