Ehhh, I managed to rope myself into a position that I absolutely 100% regret taking. The pay is a step up from what I was making before at what was essentially run like a tiny mom-and-pop operation in spite of being a regional medium enterprise (meaning lots and lots of direct interference from nepotist “managers” all through the org), but it’s still low for the sector. It’s stable, but none of my duties really match what was in the job description, and I feel like I’ve genuinely stagnated since starting at this place roughly 6 years ago.

We’re stuck doing development on this shitty proprietary platform, and experience on it is useless in the outside world because 1.) we’re doing things in the most fucked-up, ass-backwards way possible (because reasons), and 2.) whatever community there used to be around this product died off around 2019-2020 when the vendor decided to close-source most of it, break backwards compatibility with their own software, and start ushering everyone over to SaaS/PaaS offerings so they can herd them into a rent-seeking scheme. The vendor also keeps churning through developer staff, so it’s like being in the fucking wilderness whenever we run across core/platform bugs. None of it fucking matters to the higher-ups because our company is balls-deep into vendor lock-in with these absolute clowns.

Even doing basic dev tasks on this platform takes an absurd amount of extra mental load just to remember all of the quirky shit that breaks when you try to use things like basic IDE features. And if it isn’t a problem with the IDE itself, our corpo remote desktop environment has so many security/antivirus/binary execution/network traffic nanny background processes that the IDE runs like absolute shit. I love clicking on a UI element and waiting two and a half minutes for the program to respond. Doing a debugger run? Grab a cup of coffee and come back in 8 minutes, and your simple Hello World program might finally be running. (If you’ve ever used any of the “weird” IDEs that were built on top of Eclipse, e.g., Eclipse PDT, this is a similar animal. It makes Electron look minimalist.)

It’s pretty incredible, and it makes me long for goddamned fucking PHP. So yeah, I used to be a big software dev enthusiast. I have a physical bookshelf that is overflowing with everything from game development books to Web framework stuff to software engineering, design, and QA works, and a handful of “learn X programming language” textbooks that I like to use as desk references. I have a massive collection of tech ebooks. I run a VMware ESXi homelab with a second server running a FreeNAS instance as both a filer and a block-storage SAN. I have forgotten more about Red Hat Linux command line than most of my counterparts will ever learn in their careers… And I am done with this shit. I am beaten. Broken. I want to move to a fucking cabin in the woods and live off the grid so I never get roped into another 25-person Zoom meeting full of incompetent middle managers ever again. The only reason I haven’t quit is because my self-confidence is completely shot after all of this, and I don’t know that I can make it through an interview without having a breakdown.

TL;DR: You probably made the right call.