[WouterSpaak]

Really sounds like you'd be happiest at a large, well established corporation.

I've been in the startup world as well, really didn't like all the things you listed that are so prevalent in 'start up culture'.

I've been working as a senior engineer at a large financial institution for about a year. Programmers are not seen as these people who are expected to work insane hours under tremendous pressure. But they are seen as very valuable staff: our company recently decided they were a software company first, and a financial company second.

While the problems we're solving might not be as sexy as the Hot-New-Thing (we've yet to do anything with machine learning), they're very challenging and incredibly important -- not only to the company's bottom line but also to the millions of customers using our applications.

Sure, there's years of technical debt not everyone is a talented, brilliant programmer. But we do some amazing work and the many decades of experience the organisation has in HR makes for a very enjoyable, engaging and challenging workplace.