u/Backpack1995

I can’t tell if I’m actually interested in something or if I just like the idea of it when I’m frustrated with my current job.

Been job hunting for 3 months. Started targeted, got desperate, now I'm applying to anything that looks close to my experience. Getting callbacks but nothing feels right when I research the companies. I think the real problem is I don't actually know what I'm looking for beyond a paycheck. That's a pretty low bar and I'm still not hitting it.

35M. Decent job. Pay is fine. Everything is fine. But I sit at my desk every day feeling like I'm wasting the only life I get doing something that means nothing to me. I can't talk about this with anyone because the response is always, you should be grateful and yeah I know. I am. And I still feel empty. Not depressed. Like something important is missing and I can't figure out what it is.

Looking into career assessment services with personalized coaching options and the price range is insane. Anywhere from $50 for a self guided report to $2000+ for assessments bundled with coaching sessions.

For those who've tried either route: is the coaching worth the extra cost or do self guided assessments give you enough to work with on your own?

posting this because i've been reading career-stuck threads for months and almost all of them assume the OP is bad at their job, or burned out, or in a toxic environment. mine is none of those. by every external measure i'm doing good. high reviews. last promotion was three months ahead of cycle. peers ask me to mentor them. the work is hard and i deliver it. i was raised to think this is what success feels like. instead it feels like a slow leak.

has anyone here had this experience, where you're objectively winning at something and quietly losing yourself in the process? what variable turned out to be moving when you looked at it carefully?

been senior+ in this industry for a while. the team i joined two roles ago was, on paper, the best team i'd ever worked with. cracked engineers, calm manager, real ownership, the kind of code review culture you read essays about and assume is fictional. i should have been doing good.

by month ten i was asking my partner whether i should quit tech entirely. that's the part of the story everyone tells. burned out senior, considers career change, blah blah.

what nobody told me, what i never read in the burnout content, what no career assessment i've ever taken caught: my capability was fine. i was producing the best work of my career. the thing that was breaking was downstream of an environment variable that no test i'd taken even tried to measure. specifically: how i hold high-stakes ambiguity over long horizons. that team was 18-month research projects with no shippable milestone in between. i'm a person who needs a release every two weeks or my nervous system starts eating itself. nobody told me this in a report. i had to find it by elimination.

i'd taken the standard battery before. mbti (told me i was "innovative"). cliftonstrengths (gave me 34 themes none of which mentioned how i hold pressure). 16personalities premium (came back saying i was "good in collaborative environments," which the team i was breaking on absolutely was). holland code (the same letters i've gotten since i was 19). all of them measured my personality, my interests, or my abstract strengths. none of them asked the question that would have predicted my breakdown: under what kind of pressure, on what kind of timeline, against what kind of ambiguity, do you crack.

the test that finally surfaced it was a paid one a friend recommended. i'm not going to lead with the name because i don't want this to read as a pitch, but the relevant thing it did differently was treat stress profile as a separate axis from cognitive style and from team dynamics. all three are different. you can be a strong systems thinker (cognitive), in a team that nominally fits you (dynamics), and still break (stress profile mismatch). i'd been collapsing those three into "fit" my whole career and the result was a series of moves that were 2 out of 3 every time.

what i did with the data: didn't quit tech. moved to a smaller team with shorter cycles, same comp, no manager change required. four months in, i sleep again. the work is technically less interesting than the team i left. the floor-lying has stopped. capability didn't change. the stress-axis match did.

posting because i suspect the senior dev burnout content is mostly written about cognitive load and team-dynamics fit, and the third axis is doing more damage than either of those for a non-trivial slice of us. if anyone here has had a "good team, good work, falling apart" stretch, curious what variable it turned out to be when you looked back. especially curious if any of the standard tests caught it for you, because none of mine did.