Goodness, you and the OP have really hit the nail on the head.

I spent the last 5 years quite happy at a simple dev shop. Then they hired a bunch of people, paid them more than me, and allowed them complete free reign to write what ever kind of code on some brand new projects. After a year of this, one person quit mid-project, another died mysteriously (covid?), and then another just recently quit. My boss expected me to just pick up the slack on these three projects that were written in the most arcane and buffoon way possible. I basically just said no, and left. I had already been driven half insane over the year just trying to figure out the crap they were committing.

This was in the spring and I'm still unemployed. I'm mostly Java and some older languages, and was really looking forward to jumping onto python and django. But it's been a struggle really learning django good enough to interview for without any good experience behind me. I have a family and on top of covid issues and this year in general, sitting at home trying to learn a giant web framework is not very motivating when I could be spending it with my family (which were already severely affected by all my time I "wasted" going above and beyond at my last job for 5 years).

I just recently did an interview for a small django shop that didn't even test on django. Instead, I was given a half page of python code and asked to "fix" the problems. No requirements or tips. There was a syntax error, a bug, and a few cosmetic things.. I managed to find 8. All this while being stared at over Zoom. I was informed that "junior" devs can find 10-12 "problems", but they only hire those that "find" more than 18 (apparently 25 is the max).

I still got the code and look at it every now and then. Half a page of code that does nothing but take a list of "item" objects and print out an aggregate of a total price by item type. A loop over nothing but:

  total[item.type] += item.cost

Of course there was some random data mangling above and below that, but that is the logic. Find the problems?! Should I raise errors or use a namedtuple or defaultdict? Half a page of code that could have just been a Select/Group by in SQL. No senor dev should be summing data like that. Sadly they said the code was from "production". They have "interviewed" over a hundred people in this year and hired only 1. All this for $45/hr 1099.

In the beginning, I briefly thought I could use my savings to start some kind of business, not sure what. But I've blown most of that just paying the bills while I "interview".

I used to love software and would dream and breath it. But I've never been so unmotivated over these last 6 months. I'm debating on just applying at a local small town municipal IT job for $30 an hour. Giving up basically. Just show up at 8am, answer the phone mindlessly for IT "problems" and tell people to try restarting their windows machine (at least 3 times minimum) and screw of playing solitaire the rest of the day. But it seems so pointless and waste of a life. But even that doesn't motivate me, but just makes me more depressed and even slower going.