One of the things that annoyed me about this field is the obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects. Sometimes a job is just a job.
I don't live to work anymore, I work to live.
I still get stellar marks at work, i know my shit and i'm good at it. But the illusion has worn off for me. It's just a job. I meet deadlines, but I also push back on deadlines that require crunch time or weekend work. I push back on weekend or late time work completely now. I'm not embarrassed anymore to say "I don't want to work on the weekend, and its unreasonable for you to expect me to, so that project will get done next week".
My job is a means for providing for a comfortable retirement, and a comfortable life. I enjoy tech, but I enjoy my hobbies more. My hobbies keep me healthy and happy, work doesn't do either of those two things. Work is work, that's fine. But let's call it what it is. Let's not forget to live too.
Balls the size of spacehoppers. I love it.
Unfortunately FAANG rating systems aren't great and often reward vanity projects going nowhere over the work keeping the company afloat, so I entirely believe that's possible even while having good ratings.
There is no way these two things aren't connected.
And since they are the majority they get to decide. And they decide to choose mediocrity. Consoling themselves that "good code isn't that important", "I'll do it next week", and other excuses.
I’ve worked with plenty of people like you and some of them wouldn’t know a good product if it smacked them in the face. Most products don’t need more engineering capabilities, they need people involved with excellence in multiple skills.
Apple is an embodiment of this. None of their engineering is bleeding edge but they make categorically redefining products. People that nerd out over something like Linux wouldn’t get it.
By the way you are talking, no, you have not worked with people like me. Most products are garbage because of poor planning, poor market research and bad/rushed engineering.
Tell me you don't know anything about Apple without telling me that you don't know anything about Apple. A lot of their engineering is absolutely bleeding edge. Right now I am working on improving/adding features to a real time ray tracing renderer that works at 30+ fps on the latest iPhones 14 Pro. Most people's desktop PCs cannot do real time ray tracing and yet Apple does it on a phone. But I guess that is not bleeding edge...
I say this after doing SW development for a few decades. You can't count on "passion," "rockstars" or "10x developers." You can only count on the slogs who show up, do a good job and go home.
I got into it for the passion, but I don't have it as much as I did. I can't imagine doing something else like marketing or accounting though.
>obsession with ones career and over-the-top manufactured enthusiasm for very mundane projects.
That's most corporate places, especially in sales. One of the funniest takes is Step Brothers, "it's the Catalina wine mixer!"
I really loved tech. For about a decade I truly loved every day of work. Then I got really worn out and it took me almost 5 years to work through it. Part of this low point was a point of terrible health (mostly caused by my job and stress). When I came back out of it, I considered leaving the field, but stayed in it for the money.
I was in a management position at this point. I could go into a different field and start over, but I'd probably end up working my way up to management eventually too and its really all the same at that point. You are managing people and processes. So I might as well do that with the tech spin on it.
The obsession with over-manufactured enthusiasm is one I really laugh at now that I look back on my career. I realized that most of us in tech will work on boring stuff. I can't even tell what I am working on anymore, to the point that it is almost comical. I could be building self-driving cars or cloud billing portals. At the end of the day, you are fixing bugs or improving performance or polishing my tiny grain of sand in the huge sculpture that these platforms have become. When you are working on large-scale complex platforms nobody really understands how it all works. There is no magic, even when working on "sexy" projects. I've worked on exciting projects and boring projects and the day-to-day experience is exactly the same.
Pro Tip: "Boring" projects tend to pay better, and since its the same work and same day-to-day experience, take the boring projects. You also tend to find fewer sensationalized colleagues on those projects.
Look at it this way:
Your boring, cushy tech job only exists because the industry as a whole is grossly inefficient.
That's why so many people are doing nearly the same thing, over and over and over, day after day.
If it wasn't for that inefficiency you would need to find other work, and it would probably be a lot more difficult than your current job.
So, glass half full.