Your comment resonated with me quite a bit, in fact enough to persuade me to finally create an account here (longtime lurker). I'm an older developer as well and have had many similar thoughts to yours lately.

> But now, I can barely install a new software stack without this primal sense of exhaustion. I can't explain it, but it feels like everything is just.. wrong somehow. Or a little off. Like maybe the profit motive and disruption became the primary motivators instead of progress and scientific discovery.

I have felt this way recently too. I have thought that in my case perhaps it's burnout, but I think I could put it even more accurately as a sense of futility. Learning another framework that largely solves the same problems, but with a new author or a new company backing it. I think some (many, most?) of these new frameworks arise because thoughtful engineers want to dig into a problem (and learn by doing), and the really good ones come up with these useful frameworks/languages. And maybe that is the best way to really learn something. I'm sure many folks posting here could easily, like you mention, write their own language (or lisp interpreter!), or web framework etc. In fact, I guess I don't even necessarily see it as a bad thing - I'd just rather be driving my choice of technology and I feel the futility when something is /oversold/ to me and I'm /forced/ to learn it or be considered a dinosaur. Maybe exhaustion is an even better word than futility, exhaustion at doing the same thing over and over again (maybe even new framework or not).

For me though, I have felt this sense of exhaustion/futility more profoundly since I've gotten into Lisp. I think it really is a different, and a fundamentally better approach to language design. It's interested me in the history of computer science, and I've been reading a lot of foundational papers in the field. I'm honestly pretty disappointed my undergrad school's CS curriculum didn't give any of this stuff more than a cursory look in any of the classes I took. It's made it that much harder though for me to get into the framework of the day -- it's almost ruined regular development for me :-). Thought exercise: look at how the "walrus" operator in python has caused such strong reactions out of so many people -- it's just a simple macro in a lisp, developers could write a macro that accomplishes this functionality in a few lines of code and use it without forcing any consumer of their code to even update their language runtime! Now while the technical solution here is so obvious and perfect, maybe the strong reactions people have would be the same -- whether or not one /should/ write such a macro etc :-).

> And unfortunately, that nebulous ball of cruft is where the money is in software development. I've spent the last 20 years knee deep in code so ugly (from assembly code up through SQL) that I feel like a plumber who sees code as.. sewage. There is just so much code, filling every crack where declarative and data-driven solutions would accomplish the exact same thing but with no side effects.

Yes -- I've had the same experience. I think this is mainly for me though a dissatisfaction of writing or being a part of so many similar apps (but yet writing them all like the first time, in different ways). I'd rather I think in the long run have written them in one language (Lisp, but I'd even take just sticking with C over the long run) -- and be able to build on my past work. Then at least if another app was truly like something I'd done in the past I could just instantly complete it, or better yet, spend my time /just/ learning the real domain of the problem, rather than wasting time with the shiny technical wrapping paper around it.

> If I'm depressed then it's environmental, and I feel stuck with it because I can't change the world. But that's why I learned to code in the first place 30 years ago. So now what? I guess I'm just curious if any older devs here have reached similar conclusions. And like, were you able to rise above it? Were you lucky enough to start 5 years earlier than me and capitalize on the booms to the point where you're independently wealthy now? Or is that a widespread fallacy, that "if I was just a little older" maybe I could have ridden a bubble? Or do you fantasize about being 20 years younger, starting in the world today where you have access to all the secrets of entrepreneurship online and still have a beginner's optimism?

I'm not independently wealthy, as you have a few years on me, I missed all the bubbles too. I do live minimally in the hope of getting out as early as possible though, or putting myself in a place where I could maybe contemplate a career change. What depresses me more though is this: I'm pretty sure I could continue on this treadmill pretty easily if I believed more in where the industry was going. I've recently read "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" and am fully in agreement with the author's views on the large tech companies. In fact, I've declined working for one of the big tech companies for these reasons already. I fantasize about getting out of tech, or if I do stay in tech maybe of starting a non-profit similar to the FSF or EFF (and figuring how to sustain my family while doing so). That or get into tech related to medicine. I've always wanted to teach, but I fully believe if I ever were to teach CS (and I absolutely /love/ it and got an advanced degree in the hopes of eventually teaching), I would have to believe in the types of jobs out there, and I don't want to quit industry to teach, I want to /retire/ happily from industry and teach (believing in where industry is going). I also don't want to teach people who will have no job prospects but those that continue to further the age of surveillance capitalism. Though, I don't blame people who do. In my younger years I never cared about a "why", but was always just hyper-actively interested in whatever the technical problem was.

I don't long for being 20 years younger and getting in to tech today, I long for the age when Microsoft was the big bad tech company. At least then they weren't spying on everyone, and Linux/open source was a bright spot, and we controlled our own hardware. If anything, I wish my prime had been when comp.lang.lisp was in its prime. Mostly though, I fantasize about working with deep thinkers to solve problems actually worth solving.