I'm in my early 30s and I am so close to hitting this point myself. I entered this field because I found the craft to be fascinating. I learned how beautiful the fields of computer science and programming truly are as well as the mathematics both were built upon.

I fundamentally believe a lot of my issues with our field is partly a skill issue on my part -- if I were talented enough, then I might be able to achieve what I truly desire: to work on projects where people care about quality and care about the problem that is trying to be solved.

However, I feel like my IC career is akin to an assembly-line worker. The people I have worked with do not care about quality nor programming/computer science at all. They just want to get things done as fast as possible while extracting as much money as they can.

So yes, I am about to stop caring. If companies want fast churning, low-quality software, then so be it. I'll just need to get over tying some part of my identity to my work.

I hear echoes of myself here. I made it a goal to learn enough about compilers because they were cool, and also to try to escape the thermocline of quality that I saw that was pervasive in industry. The hope was I could build skills in something that isn't easily commoditized. I was somewhat successful: I've worked on some nifty and difficult things, learning a lot of CS along the way.

However, the risk of burnout still exists, but this time, from overwork, because there is essentially an unbounded amount of work that could be done. Additionally, my career growth at my current place is probably stalled out unless I want to do substantially less tech work. This occurs because they have a lot of people who've amassed a lot of specialized expertise, so technical skill is commonplace.

Ultimately, I arrived in a spot in my career that isn't terribly different from most people, despite the amount of work and time put into trying to break away from that. I don't regret it, but there is a sense of wondering whether it was really worth it if my progression, pay, and everything else follows the same age-gated gradient that is prevalent in industry.