Conflating actual productive academic research with the mundane triviality of a day job is crazy.
We also write up a weekly priorities (by team), and all the leadership put it together into emails. It is a great way for me to read what is going on.
I shift between deep work and collaborative problem solving.
It is not as if you can’t try structure things to have both.
I don't see any reason to permanently stay in a role filled with mundane triviality .
This is literally opposite of “keep doors open”, if you find a better job you need to grind leetcode to get there.
Well for starters with over a decade of experience I still need to halt my entire life to grind leetcode for months.
What does a top leetcode score give you? The opportunity to build CRUD apps for FAANG. No thanks. What if I go towards working at a university as “retirement”? Well, now I’m just building apps to test hypotheses developed by someone else. Grass still ain’t greener and I still don’t need to be “collaborative”.
I think the modern developer views themselves wrongly as a world changing force. When in reality the majority of software engineering is getting paid a metric shitload of money to glue premade widgets together on a digital assembly line.
The good “deep” jobs are excruciatingly rare, typically vary wildly in pay, and highly competitive. It’s not like the early 80s and 90s when you could get in on some crazy cool world changing stuff like OS dev, networks, and things like it. Most of the highly available “cool” jobs are solved problems.