You are on hn so let me ask you this: Are/were you a nerd? Did you play around with systems, use linux for fun etc.?

If yes, you just might be depressed or haven't realized that a job might be shit anyway.

If no, interesting though that you are aware of hn (i have to assume a certain interest because i know plenty of software people avg ones, not being aware of hn at all).

But hf at the navy.

That's not really the qualifier you think it is. I've been coding and hacking stuff up since I was nine. Corporate programming is a great perversion of the kind of stuff I find fun to do in my spare time. In order to be successful you not only need to be a good programmer and curious person but you also need to know how to navigate corporate power structures (explicit and implicit), you need to be somewhat of a therapist helping people tap into their true problems, and above all else you need to be excellent at compartmentalization.

similar boat. Been doing software for 15 years and I used to love it. Learning new languages, side projects, contributing to open source, you name it. At every job I became less enthusiastic, like the technical problems all became the same. The actual problems became ones of people, management, customer, product, etc., and I had no interest in solving those. So this year I decided to not code... and I don't miss it at all. However I have no idea what I will work on next.

I was in the army before uni - it was grueling but awesome. You'll find your way fren