[sgtnoodle]

I mean this constructively, but it sounds like you're rather jaded from your past experiences.

I've personally experienced 4 flavors of work environments: high stress low wisdom politics (big stakes student project); High stress high wisdom politics (SpaceX); low stress high wisdom politics (Google X); and my current project, low stress high wisdom no-politics (Zipline).

Each different environment required me to adapt my own behavior appropriately to work productively with coworkers. Notably, the only environment that consistently lead me to feeling jaded and burnt out in the long term was the low-stress BigCo environment. I see a lot of truth in what you describe about your current experiences, although I never got quite that pessimistic. If you're happy slithering around the politics and are able to find fulfillment in your personal life, good on ya. That reminds me of a coworker at SpaceX who, a month or two before getting let go, admitted to spending 8 years at a defense contractor doing crossword puzzles at his desk all day, every day.

Building consensus around long term architecture is something like 80% of my current job, and over the years while the org chart has gone from 1 layer to something like 5 layers, I've successfully remained at the bottom. The folk at the top of the org chart are completely approachable, and in a lot of ways are there to serve me, solving the problems that would otherwise prevent me from getting my work done.