Most of my 10 years has been working for startup size companies. It was fun at times, then it became stressing, too much work, too much time etc. Specially when I worked in a digital agency, working for clients tech products is horrible and stressing.
I finally changed job to a huge company B2B, non tech, but needs tech for their customers. They move SLOW, Steady, and with structure. They work for their own product.
I find that I work on tickets that, in my old job (startup) I would've had to do in a few hours, and here I can take a couple days and open a PR that has been battle tested, done with time, and no stress. Much much better quality.
I love my job now. And I feel I'm actually gaining such a valuable experience! I'm never going back to how I worked for 10 years
Government and university jobs are boring too!
Ultimately, you just have to take a look at what you are good at, and what companies are likely to value that.
I’ve worked in Java most of my career and anecdotally the Java projects were the most well run and unexciting.
The PHP/Laravel and JavaScript projects by contrast were on almost unreasonably tight deadlines, somewhat chaotic (the PHP ones anyways) and high stress.
Watit and pick the one offering a boring job at something like an insurance company.
My perfect boring job was remotely developing a product with solid CI, but otherwise minimal process, which was kinda like a startup.
My most hated job was just like others mentioned - consulting at non-tech company, tons of process, very little done, tons of meetings, hybrid in-person/commute, horrible codebase. It was the most boring time ever because I had to sit countless meetings, gather requirements, fight tons of stakeholders. Whereas with product it was always pretty clear - features were well defined, I could cleanly deliver them in hours or days and just keep ever improving it.
Edit: wonder if you could buy someone's boring business via seller financing.
Delegate your work so you be stress free, plus you move towards growth
> a larger boring company with stability and predictability.
I mean, it sounds like you've got it already figured out - don't apply to startups, apply to large companies. Most of them are rather boring, although many have internal politics and other issues that are unfortunately rather exciting.
Brush up on your Java skills, esp. Java EE and Spring Framework. If you know COBOL, doors may open for you.
But be forewarned they layoff a lot of people (but never for individual performance reasons). But so do most of the boring companies these days.