I think getting burnt out of programming made me look for deeper meaning in what I was doing. I'm no longer interested in just writing syntax for the sake of it, I've now taken my interests to why specifically my syntax does what it does, and how the mathematical applications in computer science facilitate these processes.
Yeah, specific syntax and "programming" becomes routine after a while. It's only interesting if you are comparing language design and features across languages.
In industry, it's more about software engineering than just programming. Rather than code, the focus starts to become about the non-functional attributes of your software - how maintainable, extensible, scalable, robust, fast and secure it is. Some of those concerns are of more interest to certain industries than others. So then you start thinking about things like design (of code), testing, performance and maybe even how the software is deployed.
Research is really broad as it depends on your research interest, some might be about code itself but most would be at higher or lower levels of abstraction.