It's important to understand that "tech" is mostly a "horizontal" part of the economy. Meaning it cuts across multiple "vertical" industries. You can do tech for retail, tech for finance, tech for media. Finding a new vertical to be part of can make a big difference. As can finding the right cohort of people to work with. But otherwise, the lack of fulfillment will likely follow you to whatever job you take.
That goes both ways: for a tech company in a given "vertical", it helps if you can find developers that are at least somewhat knowledgeable in (or interested enough to learn something about) the vertical. Not doing that can lead to a lot of friction and wasted time.
the horizontal aspect of software has samey caricatures that get boring as well. Most of it is web development. If you switch verticals but stay in the same horizontal zone of back end web development you're mostly doing the same stuff if it's web dev.
Need to switch lanes both vertically and horizontally.
I guess it's not true for everyone, but I derive more satisfaction from the value of my end products rather than the code I write. Writing sexy code to help some Fortune 100 extract more rents doesn't do it for me. Updating legacy code for a product that creates actual value for human beings makes me feel pretty good.
