What do I want? (SWE Burnout)

I'm really tired of SWE jobs for the typical reasons. Office politics, too much bureaucracy to do my job.

I talked to a recruiter today who called me about a 6 month contract, and instead of allowing me to talk about my experience he wanted to ask why I've done so many contracts. It's so hypocritical. People who quit every 1-2 years aren't called job hoppers, but contractors are the ones that have to answer to the industries retention problem. But the reason contracts are so common is because there are so many job hoppers. And because there are so many job hoppers, there's more contract than full time. I put no blame on the engineers btw, we're in this heap together.

I have a second career. I have a class A CDL, but there are more physical reasons I don't do these jobs anymore.

I've been driving with Walmart Spark and really enjoy it. It pays surprisingly well (for what it is), there are 0 politics, and I don't have to ask permission to run an errand.

But I'm trying to figure out what I want to do with SWE. I love programming, I am often complimented on my creative problem solving. But that's never what the job is about.

You see all these LinkedIn posts about how important soft skills are. Which is fine, but it seems like the pendulum swung too far in that direction. Instead of being 50/50, it feels rare to find engineers who have been anywhere longer than 2 years who actually care about their job. Because it's only the people who focus on playing Game of Thrones that survive in the industry with the worst retention rate in the country. Think about that CTO who loves to curse out employees and talk down on everyone. If you haven't experienced this, yes, I've seen this often. It's at it's worst in "leadership" meetings. But the word leadership here is a joke.

My current decision is to still apply but reject all contracts and contract to hires. Remote only. I feel like this puts me in a position of not being able to find something for a very, very long time. Because once you've done a couple contracts, the only thing you get calls for are contracts.

So what would focusing on direct hire do? Get rid of the politics? Absolutely not. But it's more to find serious offers only. As in, I'm not coming back to this career until I know this won't destroy me. Because that's what it's doing. My mood and health drop significantly when I'm pulled in to rescue a failing project or move a team from technology A to technology B when the engineers clearly have no interest in it. Instead it's some clown that decided they want to "modernize," whatever that means according to the latest Gartner trend.

I want to do my job and work with people who want to do their job. I've seen signs of this in a couple of very talented teams. We get rolling on something, start operating with little to no communication and max efficiency like Seal Team 6 (talk about the need for hard skills over soft skills) and then big swinger CTO comes in, decides he wants some action, destroys a significant amount of work, doesn't test, and tells everyone to clean up after him.

Or an uncontrolled client ends up with direct access to every engineers ear piece and starts barking orders in the middle of the operation. Which leads to the slow destruction of the product, productivity coming to a neat halt, and the inevitable mass exodus when everyone decides their 1-2 years is up and it's time for the contractors to start rotating through.

What a sick joke this industry is. So I'm thinking about what I want, I have no clue. I'd like to find a few freelance clients, and do just enough that I don't have to hire employees and do this to anyone else. But it's hard to get started. Again, this doesn't get rid of politics, it's more about finding an environment I'm not just a plastic cog in an iron machine, a tempor...