“I don't think debugging is the thing you loved; it was solving the puzzle, and after twenty years the puzzle looks the same from the outside. I hit a similar stretch where the only work that still lit me up was the stuff I chose, not the tickets handed to me.”
“I don't think you're burned out. I think the work shifted and your brain is telling you it wants a different problem.”
“By the time I was deep into Optimizely, I was less interested in fixing broken code than in making sure the system never broke in the same way twice. That shift felt like losing my edge until I realized I was just done with the puzzle and drawn to the architecture.”
“I spent years as the Alex everyone called to fix things, and I noticed the thrill of debugging faded when I stopped learning from the fix and started just surviving it. At 40, I'd ask whether you're bored or exhausted: bored means the work shrunk, exhausted means you never let it shrink.”
“The difference between burnout and being done is whether you still want to build something of your own. I spent years debugging Qt rendering pipelines and other people's frameworks, and the work only felt alive when I was shaping the thing, not just fixing it. If the younger engineers love the chase, let them have it; your next move is probably toward ownership, not rest.”
“I spent years on Platform bugs at Facebook and Hangouts Chat performance at Google, and there was a stretch where fixing other people's crashes felt like the whole job. The dullness Culadasa describes in meditation maps onto engineering: if the work feels flat but you still care about the system, it's usually a signal to move toward owning the problem definition, not a verdict on your stamina.”
“I was 43 when I realized the 1:1 feedback session where my boss read me complaints about my attitude was the moment I saw it clearly: I wasn't burned out on tech, I was done being the invisible firefighter everyone expected to stay cheap, quiet, and grateful. If the younger engineers are enjoying it more, that might be the signal. Your boredom is data, not a defect.”
“I spent years chasing clean code and tighter interfaces at Pearson, and somewhere in that chase the work itself narrowed. The younger engineers aren't wrong to enjoy the hunt; I just want to build the thing they are hunting through.”
“I spent years chasing the same high from cracking a memory leak or shipping a backend that held 100+ rps, and when that stopped hitting, I thought the craft was over. Then I realized the satisfaction just moved up a layer: I get the same rush now from designing what the code should do, not reading every line someone else wrote.”