[robolange]

I've never worked at a FAANG, but still this resonated with me. I'm 20 years into my software engineering career, and if I'm being honest, I've accomplished nothing. Literally, not one project I've ever worked on has seen any significant deployment or had any notable impact on the world, not even my small part of it. Just project after project that's ultimately abandoned or shuttered. Sometimes the company goes under. Sometimes the lab closes. Sometimes not, but I burn out and leave just as you described. In the end, the result is the same: no impact of my work on the world, but also no impact of the failure on my "career".

I'd love to work at a competant and impactful organization on something meaningful. The problem is, I genuinely believe that the probability of such an organization existing, and of them hiring, and of my having the right skill set, and of my learning about, applying to, and passing the interview, is essentially 0. Now, I struggle daily to avoid the cynicism you described so well.

[QuarterReptile]

There's a high probability of some combination of the three: (1) your compensation expectations are too high, (2) you don't have enough appreciation for the enormously difficult task of organizing resources and peoples' efforts, and (3) you have too little willingness to credit things for 'notable impact'.

But maybe I just have low expectations or am in the right line of work.