Extremely disillusioned with technology. Please help

The bigger the hoards and the bigger the castles, the lesser and lesser these chances get. Inside the castles, the same game, but with even less interest to become subversive.

The truth is, that tech never was about innovation. It was about beeing a aristocrat with other means. The rest is decoration, flowers, girls and pretty pearls.

Now stop moaning, and go back to hoard shoveling. Slaves you have been and slaves you always will be.

If your village is outside, mining gold, in the hope to be eaten by the dragon.

Or if you live inside a castle, doesent matter.

But that's more an analogue of "use your program before you release it".

My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.

Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.

I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.

This doesn't mean that you were going to better off without git workflows, code reviews, tests. My experience has been the opposite. It's exactly where there's no good technical leads/technical discussions/code reviews I have seen this kind of mess. Each person goes on and do their own thing with no clear direction or architecture.

At the end of the day, for me, to stay sane in the face of this kind of nonsense(as in bad engineers - unfortunately there are those even at senior positions), so what if the button that could have taken a few minutes to change now takes 6 days if we are paid to do it? As a responsible engineer, you point out the issue perhaps with a proposal for improvement. If they listen, good. If they don't, fuck it. On the other hand, if all I end up doing is changing colors of buttons regularly, each taking a week, then for the sake of my career, just say no and move on - unless of course if the pay is so good that it makes sense to spend a couple years doing it - people have to do far more shitty jobs for less. And spend some of the free time to code like a cowboy :)

Ever go swimming in a pond? It's not like a swimming pool. In a swimming pool, the water is clear, the bottom is sound, humans are the only creatures there, and you can be somewhat assured of your safety. In a pond, you can't see very far in the water, the bottom is mucky and soft, there are all sorts of other creatures, and something bad may very well happen to you.

A swimming pool is not a natural system. It takes lots of work and diligence to keep it running, and even then, bad things happen. Fortunately, a swimming pool is a system with a mostly finite set of parameters to change and a similarly-small set of outcomes to manage.

Technology, startups, and BigCorps are natural systems. They're like the pond; they evolved over time without any one person managing any of it.

It took me a long time to realize that many things in life were like that pond when I was thinking most of the world was like a swimming pool. There's nothing wrong with diving into various ecosystems that have emerged out of human complexity. In fact, you can find pleasures there you can find nowhere else. But there are significant differences that nobody tells you about. These systems are emergent, they have tons of variables you might never encounter or understand, and they change based on the actions of thousands, perhaps millions of people, all of whom are not aware that they are, in effect, managing the system. (Even if they knew, no one person has the mental ability to manage all of that.)

I said all of that to say this: natural systems do not have your best interests in mind. You form a startup? Ok, there's a preexisting set of "ramps" you are supposed to get on: bootstrap, niche, unicorn, etc. People who see you in the startup world see you as being on one of those ramps. That is how they process your existence. Same goes for BigCorps: the rule there is to get along, not make waves, and have people think of you as energetic, competent, and friendly.

These are not necessarily bad systems, but you have to keep in mind everyday you interact with them that it is ultimately you who are responsible for your emotional and personal safety, not the system (No matter what they might say to you)

So yes, be disillusioned. It sounds like you've earned it. Then reflect, learn, heal, and engage differently. You've been through a tough experience. I wish you the best. If you're half as smart as you sound, you've got this.