[fbrncci]

> Essentially, everything we do is between other mammoth systems and thus most “work” is actually configuring systems to talk to each other or talking to other teams about guarantees, capacity etc. The actual engineering work is minimal and the development speed is glacial.

This is something I found out the hard way too. At some point in life I fell in love with sofware (coming from IT). Made it into a fairly big company, and came to understand that its mostly meetings, sync ups and polishing tasks on jira. I figured that quitting that job, before I'd end up hating software was the best route to go. I now am an independent contractor and consultant, only working on projects that deeply interest me. It's less stable, and throughout my career the income will likely be a lot less than at any BigTechCo (30-50%). But at least there is room for personal advancement and working on adventurous things here and there.