I disagree. I still love aspects of my job and will until the day I die. RF communication is still magic. The power of modern computers is absolutely amazing. Power efficiencies and transistor densities blow my mind. As a software engineer, I feel like I create something out of nothing.
I am completely bored with version control, flaky automated testing systems, decaying source code, the "development process", not being empowered to do good work, etc.
Things are fun when they're new. They're also fun when they don't require a lot of work. Small software is fun. Shoehorning features into a massive codebase or hunting for obscure bugs in a complex system is not always fun. Even when it is fun, it is draining.
But that’s the point - you fully understand the domain of software engineering, so it’s not magic, so at least some of the fun has gone out of it. You might not fully understand how RF communication works, or how the transistors in a chip are put together. An engineer working on either domain might well be bored of their work too. Imagine working 8 hours a day using suboptimal tools to model and tweak the radiant field of an RF antenna, or carefully optimizing the hardware demodulators, or dealing with the intricacies of Doppler frequency drift as your antenna sways in the wind (or is carried by a fast-moving object). Or, imagine a chip engineer having to redesign the scheduling pipeline for the 15th time to fix some silly flaw in one instruction, or a lithography engineer struggling to improve yields in the face of relentless quantum physical effects. Once you understand these things at a low enough level, the magic really can drain away.
But, of course, it’s useful to maintain a sense of collective achievement here - we’re where we are now because generations of scientists and engineers did the work to figure out the magic and how to harness it.
Actually I'm an EE by education and an Extra class amateur radio operator. If you put me in a room with the components I could build a computer or a radio transceiver. I don't think understanding something necessarily removes the magic. Toil and frustration removes the magic. Working on things you don't believe in, or wasting energy on counterproductive tasks removes the magic.
If I suddenly stumbled upon a giant pile of money, I'd still do what I do because it's honestly amazing. The applied sciences are the closest things to magic we'll ever get.
I am completely bored with version control, flaky automated testing systems, decaying source code, the "development process", not being empowered to do good work, etc.
Things are fun when they're new. They're also fun when they don't require a lot of work. Small software is fun. Shoehorning features into a massive codebase or hunting for obscure bugs in a complex system is not always fun. Even when it is fun, it is draining.