Very well said, couldn't agree more.

I am faced with a similar problem myself. So recently I decided to remain at my current company (the grass is always greener... anyways), and to make my job interesting by spending a little time each week on my own pursuits: like learning new tech to improve our product suite, creating nice dev tools to help make the day-to-day tasks a little easier, and trying out (in prototypes) new features for our products. These things keep me interested in my career position, and I have to believe they will actually help me advance in my career. To answer your question, I would look for in the next hypothetical position: try finding projects in a new problem domain / industry, or something that will require you to learn new tech. In your 10 short years, you certainly haven't covered every domain / industry / coding tech, and those things are constantly changing anyways, change is always good ;-)

The only problem is SEH (structured exception handling) or lack thereof. These are the access violations, pure virtual calls, etc... that people sometimes forget to catch. Even if your code and any third-party libs don't throw any c++ exceptions whatsoever, you always have the possibility for structure exceptions.

I agree though, personally don't like c++ exceptions, I like return codes much much better.