Ironically, the review process does not reflect any of this. You are asked technical questions as if you really are going to do any of that on a day to day basis, or even have that kind of mindset. The usual attitude that is expected has more to do with business and making profit rather than engineering good systems.
Of course, if ones metric is “FAANG or nothing” or maximizing compensation, you get what you seek - which may be miserable work in exchange for status and cash. I realized a long time ago that neither status nor cash outweighs enjoying what I do.
Most poeple out there building new rail are building them in situations similar to how other people have already built rail: apply known best practices given the intricacies of the current situation. Very few people are doing things like "building the worlds first rail line across a floating bridge" (Seattle I-405).
Even something like DeepSeek in China, wasn't necessarily so much about big AI breakthroughs as it was low level optimization of existing hardware. At the end of the day, even big achievements are built on piles and piles of what seems like drudgery, I guess it's just about feeling like that drudgery is contributing to something great.
I've worked for orgs that thought about Kubernetes but not any that pulled the trigger. Let's face it, we used to run web sites that had millions of users out of a single instance of mysql 20 years ago. You could fit all the people who admin web sites that really need distributed systems in a big conference hall in Las Vegas, if you deleted Google you could fit them all in the Moscone Center. (SV companies wouldn't send a bunch of kids to Vegas though because they wouldn't trust not to get in them w/ the alcohol, the cards and the hookers)
I'm not impressed that anybody got something done in two years with 100 engineers that got paid $300,000 per year and aren't saving a dime because they're paying it all to landlords who were far sighted enough to buy property around the San Francisco bay before there was a Google. I am impressed when 2 or 3 people that could have starred in a Wix commercial and live in a flyover state get something done over the weekend.
I love being able to make a smart RSS reader, an image sorter that works with my tablet and my VR headset, web applications for car dealers and vineyards, social networks for secret societies and a great web site for searching public opinion data that makes our competitors look like a bad dream. Sure it took me a while to stop worrying and love React but I think it's a great time to be alive.
2. If you’re in a big company that is the part of the game. By design. Want to xcitement - join a startup.
In my experience if you want interesting work you need to seek out a more niche domain like systems programming, graphics, computer vision, audio, embedded, AI, GPU programming, robotics, gamedev, etc...
Something that hasn't been streamlined/optimized to death by 1000 other developers
Otherwise its just wiring together APIs, shuffling data around, and wrangling deployments/infra.
That said, I do kind of miss the programming itself being interesting. I did more difficult programming at university.
Also, Dan Luu[2].
Outside of the US, career driven development (CDD) might be needed to get your salary to a level you can say ... have a family. Or for some ... afford rent. Therefore my salary is dependent on me not understanding development Zen!
Then with an army of CDDs there is a tide that is hard to swim against.
Making it worse is how we interview people and any heroics you did at the last job are worth 0c but ability to talk about GraphQL and advanced TS and AWS are worth, dunno, $20k.
What were we doing that was so exciting a decade ago? We were stitching together different APIs, wrestling with jQuery, and managing servers.
I mean, you're not wrong - someone was out there creating React, and Kubernetes, and AWS, and programming languages, all the stuff we're using now. But most of us were still doing the same stuff. And turns out, it still paid the same bills.
There are some cool software jobs that deal with embedded SoCs, but those don't pay nearly as well.