After 3 years of being the first in and last to leave, of getting other people's work reassigned to me - P can't complete it on time, G doesn't like the user, A refuses to work on that module, etc... I finally blew last Sept.
In the span of 2 days, my boss brought me into a project 1.5 years in (she doesn't trust P to do the coding) and expected me to be up to speed and coding in a couple of days, told the functional dept that I would cover for one of their guys on vaca for three weeks and assigned me to take over a HUGE project from one of the other functional guys who wasn't getting it done. So basically I'm now doing Ps job AND supporting another department AND taking control of a large project from another department. I'm the idiot working 14 hour days while they're all leaving on time or enjoying their 3 week vaca to India.
I lost it. It's bad enough filling in the gaps in my own department but when I'm now taking on work for other departments, that's where I draw the line. I sent my boss my resignation - just could not take the inequity in the work load.
I'm still working here - my boss ended up hiring a consultant to handle the functional project and told the functional group to find their own vacation coverage. She's also monitoring workloads much closer now. I still habe an ongoing issue with having to complete other peoples work for them but I'm not working OT to do it. So speaking up helps. So does quitting.

Oh my! This guy is such a dickhead! We have a release tomorrow and he just changed everything a coworker did in the past few weeks because it had some errors and looked not polished enough.

Now it looks quite nice.

*sigh* Sometimes I can be such an asshat.

What are peoples thoughts on taking a sort of backwards step in their career in order to get more experience?

I took my current job as I thought it would be a stepping stone to go on and do more development work (it was my first dev role), but I’ve been here 4.5 years and I rarely do anything other than maybe fix a bug every now and then.

They mainly have me doing non-dev support type stuff, and they don’t use any best practices or anything like that, and I feel that I am falling behind where I should be experience wise.

I am doing a degree (distance learning with the Open University) so I am working on personal development but that’s not much help when I go to interviews.

Should I think about trying to go for junior jobs, rather than just developer jobs, and the pay cuts that may go with that, or should I just grind out leet code etc and keep booking interviews?