I was self-motivated to constantly learn, and had no trouble doing it... when I was young. It was the right profession for me then, when I had the interest and passion.
After a while, though, much of it starts to seem the same. The towering vistas that were once full of mystery, adventure, and discovery turned in to endless plateaus of rinse and repeat learning of technical minutia and buzzword tech of the day. I also developed lots of new interests, and started to want to have an actual life outside of work.
So then I very consciously decided not to strive to excel in my field anymore, because it would just take way too much of my time, which I'd rather spend doing other things. Then, before too long, I burnt out, and took a long break, eventually coming back to the field because I burnt through all my savings and needed money. This happened a bunch of times, with ever longer breaks in between.
Every time, I was able to brush up on the technology knowledge and skills that I needed to get a job, but I was never as excited about it as I was when I was young, and actually started to dread working with it, as I found it mind-numbingly boring.
I should have definitely completely switched careers after my first major burnout, but I didn't, and I've come back to the field again and again instead. This has definitely been a mistake, but here I am. I'm good enough at what I do to get work, and to even impress my managers... while I still haven't burnt out this time around and am still capable of putting in the overtime to get a lot done. But it's just a matter of time until I burn out again, and this pattern of not working for extended periods of time looks horrible on my resume, I haven't learned nearly as much as I would have had I stayed employed the whole time, and my career is nowhere near as advanced as that of people who can hack full-time employment long-term.
I don't think my case is typical, as most people seem to stay employed continuously in the long run. But I can't, and I feel I'm way too old for a career change now... and, anyway, I suspect whatever it is that I'd switch careers to would get boring before long and I'd burn out again. My interests are far too varied and I can't stick to doing any one thing for long before getting bored.
This is not to mention all of the endless corporate bullshit one has to put up with at work. Some people are really career-oriented and can deal with it. I'm not.
I took my current job with the goal of transitioning into a leadership role, either product or management. I was walking into a situation where I knew people already here and was hoping to leverage that. Those people left a few months after I started, and now I'm kind of stuck on an island. I've approached my current boss but he's completely uninterested in promoting any sort of career development.
Bottom line is I'm burnt out, depressed, and bored out of my mind. The idea of learning Yet Another Web Framework fills me with dread (I'm currently doing Node/React stuff and hating it), not because I don't think I can learn the tech, but because it's no longer fulfilling in any kind of personal or professional sense.
So, I really don't know where I'm going, or what I'm going to be when I grow up.
A lot of times I feel like there is not career track after you hit "Senior Software Engineer", especially outside of super specialty tech. It feels like the only real track is management, and most places don't want to promote or change the management structure at all.
It's honestly very hard to get excited about going from Senior Engineer to Staff or Principal or whatever the text title is. Nothing will change in terms of the job. Pay is pretty well pegged to what you started at with single-digit percentage increases every year or so.
Skill wise? Learning new frameworks is just not as exciting as it used to be. Even then - the reality is that whether you're the most skilled dev in the world or a mediocre dev with only a 9 week bootcamp of experience, you're going to not understand the new environment you're dropped into when you start. It's full of weird quirks and historical oddities. It'll take time to understand those and get productive in whatever the particular stack is.
All of which feels like... every time you start a new job, you're starting over. With a little more insight and vision, but fundamentally, doing the same thing over and over.
I really think this time I'm out for good. I'm approaching that age where it's hard to get programming jobs anyway. I've got some side businesses doing OK; I'm working on ramping them up, and trying to get some teaching gigs to fill the gap in the meantime. And if all that fails I'm considering getting back into the lawn care business like I did when I was a student.
I used to be very passionate about programming: I started in 4th grade, started my first software business in college, and was always doing side projects.
My strategy for my career is to try and position myself into a position of enough authority to decide priorities around software engineering, and what my team is working on. Then I can delegate all of the boilerplate to the younger engineers, and spend more time collaborating on much more interesting and difficult problems.
I look around at my bigN and I see all these 20something people who just love what they're working on and are passionate about it, and I get it. I was the same way at that age.
I just don't care anymore, tbh. I want to work on something fun, and things that are fun don't usually provide a paycheck. So I grind away, and the years waste away, and I don't know what to do about it. I'm smart enough to get by without investing a lot of effort, but I'm really just wasting my life.
Programmers to programmers: You must be a super agile ninja capable of teaching yourself everything at a moment's notice.
Businesses to programmers: Yeah, we still need people doing Java 6 and VB6. We're also going to disregard all of your security and technical debt concerns. We're also going to hire managers who suddenly change a bunch of tech, causing the rest of the team to re-train themselves, harming their career.
I still don't get where this need comes from. The world still needs LOB developers. The uber-ninjas haven't solved that problem yet. It isn't going to maximize your lifetime earnings, but you're not likely to retire under $100k either.
Programmers are extra-ordinarily hard on themselves and other programmers in industries where businesses still just don't give a fuck because they are making so much.
I really wish I knew why you guys did this to us.
I'd be interested in a demographic breakdown of the people who say this. I'd be willing to bet that most of them are in their twenties, live in SF/SV or Seattle, and/or work at startups or insanely demanding trendsetting companies (e.g. Google, Amazon, Tesla, Apple). In other words, these claims are made by people who care about being "cool".
I don't think you'll hear this much from people who live in less trendy areas and work at less trendy companies. Older people and people who work at conservative companies in conservative areas of conservative states (Hi, I work at a B2B telecom in Plano, Texas, and I'm in my 30s) probably aren't going to be making those kinds of claims.
If you stop caring about being "cool", you'll find plenty of work that'll sustain you until you retire.
I imagine there's also a good helping of: "Hey, the MVP works and I won't be here in years 2-10 maintaining it, so everything I can see indicates I successfully learned X on my own in a month."