This is unfortunate, but all to common. The joy of coding gets lost in politics, deadlines,.documentation and process. If this is you, you might want to give gig process work a shot. As a developer, you're actually intimately familiar with how systems work and interact, abstraction, and the interactions between the boxes. I'm pushing 50, have 4 consulting retainers going that have been with me for over 10 years each, and I'm still feeling the same buzz of figuring out my customers processes, developing a solution and seeing it implemented as I designed. Coding is the drudgery, but when you're playing a meaningful part in effecting company wide change, it's something else.