I'm in mid-career now. While I still enjoy writing a really great app that people want to use, applications are mostly CRUD-based and a little dull. It's not the fault of my employer or any for that matter. It's just that fetching and posting data is a core of what organizations do with IT systems. For a while, fooling with new languages and frameworks made the work more interesting. But even that is getting old. I wonder now if there are more uses for computers than just CRUD-based applications. Unfortunately, organizations don't generally give a developer time to explore questions about software use.

My answer is to work toward a doctoral in computer science. It seems the only way I'm going to get time to give vent to my own inquisitiveness. At the end, I get to do research and mentor the new generation of developers coming up.