I dislike my current position and feel stuck more then ever.

Lead/Manager

I'm full-stack, 11 YOE, and by full-stack I mean - I've really touched many development fields and various stack.
I'm kinda in a place where I thought I'll never be, because I was so enthusiastic when I finally got a first chance to grow as a SWE on my first employment. Thing is that I'm in the same company from my day 1 as an intern.

So I would like to mention things from my career so you can get big picture where I am.
I start as number 2, working for a local guy who was working remotely at the time for Nordic company and was key person in dev team. He has built 20-year-old now replication system that enabled SaaS to grow at the time - so he was ahead of time at his best times. I was happy to be his first employee as I was hungry to learn and grow professionally after having many rejections from local companies.

He had some side local projects as his dream was always to build its own product and grow a company on top of it. So I was building my knowledge on this local startups and touched many parts in development, and it was more fun because it was mix of hardware and software startups. So at the time I worked at things like:
- developing arduino, custom microcontrollers, raspberry pi which would trigger various hardware parts, access points, or read various sensor readings, etc.
- developing .NET WPF applications on MVVM patterns, building stuff like POS systems, schedulers, various managements tools, reports
- webifying similar tools and application later with vanilla js, later framework modern js frameworks
- developing business logic and APIs on express.js, .NET framework, later .NET Core+

So then I matured to some mid-level in my career, and my employer became my close friend, and he wanted the best for me. While we battled hard for some of these startups to perform better after some years we figured it's not doing well enough - so he advised that we start expanding and build a local team which would also outsource as he is for his partners - which is stable European mid-sized company having stable SaaS over 20+ years in specific niche.

So we started a team, and we work for 7 years now as their partners and we became main dev department for them. In those 7 years working with them I became second best SWE right by my colleague side - while they had ~15 devs at the time before our team.
So in those 7 years I did:
- migration of many legacy solutions to modern tech stack
- moving .NET framework to .NET core +
- architecting new business logic
- architecting new authorization between ~20 projects
- migration of old WebForms, vanilla JS projects to modern js frameworks
- last 2 years I'm main person to develop new infrastructure for entire monolith SaaS, containerize and move to Kubernetes, which is currently in early production
- in the meantime I was also a recruiter for our own local team, and then mentored interns, juniors, where we got 11 people to medior level, and now have couple of seniors too. So we grew to team of 12 YTD.

We still have some side projects going, and never stopped with that, but nothing huge, just some additional profit. Our local company is paid 40 USD/h for my work, while days off are not paid (sick leave, vacations, national days etc.). It is roughly 140 work hours monthly.

So at the and of the day, I am nowadays unsatisfied more then ever. I was always hoping we would get our own product which unfortunately never came. I'm sick of consultancy and outsource work, and I guess market time today is worse then ever to hope for something different.

But maybe I'm seeing this only from my perspective - being in the same company for my entire career. It's hard to think of leaving, as I'm freaked to have screenings at this life point. It's also hard to have a clue on what's going on as I haven't had much insights elsewhere, and I don't have experiences from other places so I could compare to.

It is also hard to asses my seniority or experience, as the company I worked for was having much legacy systems, and did not had high-tech standards throughout my entire career, so I was mostly free handed to do, investigate and do my best implementing modern solutions. But I always pushed myself to be thorough, and to build the best solutions I can.

Anyway, just wanted to hear some thoughts and comments from experienced colleagues.

Posted Jul 13, 2026, 4:31 PM UTC

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