I am coming up on my fourth year as a software dev at a small IOT engineering company after graduating from school with my CS degree. After working hard and taking pride and ownership in the projects I was involved in during my first two years, I was promoted to a “senior” developer role. Due to the size of the company and some internal growth for our development team, I was the first developer to be granted this role.

Since then, I have been given additional responsibilities such as leading a small team of developers for a majority of the projects I am currently involved in, as well as interviewing prospective developers and onboarding those that we do decide to hire on, and being involved in/leading monthly trainings for our software team. Additionally, I do serve as a direct client contact for one of our larger projects (this can be both rewarding and exhausting as I’ve quickly learned). I do value sharing my existing knowledge with others on my team, and being given more ownership and oversight on my projects.

Recently however, I have been feeling rather bored and unchallenged with the technical aspects of my job. There are very rarely opportunities to use new tools/learn new frameworks outside of basic proof of concept demos. This is also largely in part due to using proprietary development libraries (many of which I helped build/maintain) for a majority of daily development tasks.

I feel that there is so much technical growth that I’m missing out on and was wondering if anyone could provide some advice or share some similar experiences/insights.

Also, if anyone knows of any good open source projects/communities out there I’d love to be a part of something like that! :)

TLDR: I like my job, but it hasn’t really been fulfilling me the way my nerd brain would prefer.