Totally agree on the sensitive or decisive topics point, but I include a caveat that what some people call “sharing decisive viewpoints in public”, others call “not hiding their gender/sexual orientation”, and similar things, so it’s not always perfectly clear cut.

I try to avoid being inflammatory in general, anonymous or not, and I’m not perturbed if people know my city, industry, trade, and vague interests. Basically what you could figure out from a polite conversation while waiting in line.

I’ve got a lot of code up on GitHub, and some of it is absolute garbage. If an employer judges me poorly for sharing my pile of one-off scripts, or “basic human decency and lack of respect for neo Nazis in a casual setting”, then I frankly probably don’t care to work for them.
Admittedly, other than a script that automates figuring out which web hosts are hosting hate groups, there’s not much political content in my software.

I do alright, so my system seems to work.

I’ve been a developer for about 15 years.

Nothing you’ve said makes me feel like you should quit.
Wanting more money is a perfectly respectable reason to want to quit, and if you think it would make you happier, go for it. Get paid.

It’s not better to be an engineer or anything. No one will mind or hold it against you if you come back and say that you were a jr dev, took a position as otherntech job, but it wasn’t for you so now your back with a new perspective and set of experiences.

Programming was once my passion. I got a lot of joy from it. I still do, and I would say that it still is a passion. But I’ve stopped really doing side projects unless it’s particularly interesting. There’s more to life than career development, and that’s okay.

Without seeing your code, I can’t know how good you actually are. Like most people, you’re probably average. Don’t beat yourself up over not knowing algorithms. No one knows those, they know the keywords and how to describe a problem and then how to pick the right one or tweak something to make it right.

The road from jr to senior is also less about technical proficiency than you would expect.
Technical competency is a must, but you’ll go further as a competent technical leader who can breakdown work, describe it, and help their teammates than as a lone high performer.

Just chat, if nothing else. We’ll also discuss larger company things, upcoming projects, any big “news” that might be relevant.
We’ll make sure that we talk about professional development stuff occasionally, and that he’s doing what he can to support my career aspirations, and that I understand what his expectations of me are and how they’re changing.

The bigger topics aren’t every time. It’s often pretty skewed towards chat since we get along well.