I have a subtly different take on this; op is cheating themselves. They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job, but they aren't because they are living down to the expectations of others.
We're inundated with stories of how Person X changed the world with their software, or Person Y who solved this amazing issue, or Company Z is doing this cool thing- with out realizing that we're only seeing the people who broke through the mundane. Working at a FANNG means you might get a chance at being in the room where they're picking people for a new team that might do something cool.
Where I work, we have this amazing internal database system we're going to open source. It's amazing tech, but for the 10 developers who made it, we have 1000 doing grunt work solving problems like "We need to get Apple Sign In working, but to do that we need to add X to Service A, Y to Service B, and refactor how we store accounts to make it work." It's not exciting.
Essentially my job right now. Learning a lot, but man is it frustrating.
Do they?
Not saying you're wrong, I'm really asking. It's not my perception that FAANG software devs have high satisfaction--more often the impression I have from talking to FAANG devs is that they feel trapped in golden handcuffs. But I'm open to the possibility that someone has better evidence than me.
I can see how self-directed-ness might give people a sense of agency. And I can also see how being able to seek out novelty could keep you from getting bored. But I don't think that agency and interest are enough to equate to satisfaction for me. For example, I think it would be difficult for me to find satisfaction at Facebook, Amazon, or Google, because the vast majority of the effect I see these companies having is harmful--I'd be waking up and going to a job where I believed I was making the world worse. No amount of agency or novelty would fix that.
Obviously everyone is different, so maybe FAANG employees are able to find satisfaction in ways that I can't. I don't know--I'm genuinely curious if there's any actual data.
We all find satisfaction in different ways though. Some get it from the products they work on, even if their individual work isn't exciting. Some get it from the actual challenges they're solving and code they're writing. Some get it from the flexibility and engineering-driven work environment and the opportunity to choose which problems they tackle each half. Some get it from the freedom to work 9-5 and have a strong separation of work and home life (barring periodic oncall or the current bizarro pandemic world). Some simply get satisfaction from knowing that the benefits and compensation they receive are helping to protect themselves, their family, and their loved ones, and ensure they have a comfortable life outside of their job.
Many find satisfaction in FAANG roles simply because they have access to one or more or all of those at the same time.
I worked at a company where we were collecting safety compliance data on workers. The data was partially medical in nature, so we were legally bound by HIPAA, meaning we could not share the data with their employers. Some of the data we collected was self-reported, while some of the data was measured objectively via sensors.
Consistently, the self-reported data showed the workers were in compliance with safety standards. Consistently, the sensor data showed them to not be in compliance.
We changed the messaging around the self-reporting, to make it clear that a) we would not share self-reported data with their employers, and b) we were bound by HIPAA, and therefore could not share self-reported data with their employers. The number of workers self-reporting non-compliance increased significantly (more than doubled) but remained lower than 30%, while the sensor data continued to show compliance in single-digit percentages. The only thing we had achieved was objective proof that the self-reported data was unreliable.
The purpose of the self-reported data was to identify faulty sensors, and it was clear we weren't achieving that goal, so we eventually dropped the self-reported data from collection entirely.
Ultimately, there's no personal benefit to expressing discontent in an internal survey. Doing so takes the risk that the data will be used against you.
I do agree, there are some reasons to believe that people DO find satisfaction at FAANG job. It's just that there are reasons to believe the opposite as well, and I don't feel like I can draw a conclusion as confidently as the poster upthread who said, "They work in a field famous for people deriving immense satisfaction from their job". The only thing I'm convinced of at this point is, "I don't know."
We just love to solve puzzles, coincidentally this is also well paid.
There are a large number of programmers in this world, there's room for there to both be tons of people who love their jobs and tons of people who hate them.
You should ask yourself, though: why are you arguing so hard against other people, who you don't know, enjoying their jobs? Why is it so important to you that this myth of happiness be debunked?
the power software engineers wield is almost unfair, compared to non-software laborers - there's unlimited ways in which to get paid fairly well, ridiculously easy lifestyle, and also work on tech that aligns with doing good in the world, generally speaking. one can't have it all at the same time... but with software, you can probably have one of the largest spreads of [mission, comfortable income, low stress, {fill in with your requirement}] out of lots of other jobs.
Large companies always have politics getting in the way of engineering decisions, resulting in annoyed engineers who can't do satisfying work.
Small organisations have less politics, more creative freedom (usually) and you can have a larger impact on the organisation.
However, they usually pay less, too. If your main priority is money then you might have to suck up the misery.
Trying to work at something you enjoy has always been the path to not enjoying that which you used to, for me anyway.