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At FAANG doing things that have a multiplicative effect across the team/several teams/entire org/entire company are rewarded extremely well and a rapid way to advance your career.
And FWIW, Amazon isn’t a typical prestigious company. FNG are different compared to it.
If the dev tools, docs and tech debt are bad and slow the entire team down, then why not take it as an opportunity to improve them? At FAANG doing things that have a multiplicative effect across the team/several teams/entire org/entire company are rewarded extremely well and a rapid way to advance your career.
They would all rather spend money hiring another useless Principal Engineer instead, who will walk around doing nothing but networking with the cabal of useless Principal Engineers.
For a real FANG, yes, that is the case. Working on tooling is insta-impact.
My experience were the first 2 years I was writing wholly new code and was able to write a ton. The next 3 years was all maintenance for new issues, requirements and I felt unproductive.
Also, just in general it felt like my output went down 50% or more because of code review and tests. Those were all essential but up until my FAANG job no team I was on did that stuff (games). We'd just make the game and file bugs while playing. We didn't write tests. We shipped too. I see the value and essential requirement for code review and tests, specially outside of games, but it was a rude awakening just how much slower things went.
There was also just process. Because of code-review you were required to write small changes which I totally understand the need for but it also felt shitty to have to babysit several changes through the CI. Can't submit #3 until #2 passes, etc... so a it felt like wasting so much time on something that used to be instant on a smaller game team. Another example is review of #2 requiring refactoring #3 and #4. And of course the re-write is correct but having to propagate it through changes was more work than if I could have just submitted one change. Similarly while babysitting this stuff someone would check in something with conflicts and again, fixing those conflicts would have been easier with one large change than 4 small changes so again, just adding what feels like busy work.
I get why it's important, it just feels poopy.
1) if you're in CA, with liberal moonlighting laws, start working on something of your own, save money, and launch what you're working on for side income or full-time entrepreneurship. Of course, if that excites you.
2) Change job
There is a 3rd option, you can move within the company to a different team, but that may or may not be better than your current situation - but it's worth trying..
Step 1: Decouple these two ideas. Getting paid a lot of money has nothing to do with good work, and visa versa. There are plenty of people who get paid a lot to do nothing, or sometimes even less than nothing, as you have discovered.
Step 2: Please let me know when you figure this one out. I, too, am flummoxed. I have given up and gone into non-profits where I just focus on the "doing good work."
However, what is always slower is the pace of development.
For example: I was at a small startup as the lead Devop. I was working about 85% capacity on average. Since takeover, that has dropped to about 15%. If I was a dev, I suspect the dip wouldn't be so pronounced, as there is still lots of work to do porting code.
But: the documentation is shit. So very shit. Some of the tools are good. SOme of them are pretty shit. Everything is re-invented from the outside, even when it doesn't need to be.
There are way more fun jobs out there, but at the moment I'm not walking away from the mountain of cash and security that comes with being in a boring role.
So at least what I did is stop trying to put so much of an expectation on my job to fulfill me. I took responsibility to find and do things at and especially outside of my day job that did fulfill me. Now I feel no large angst or annoyance at glacial paces at work that occur, political games, etc.. because I have other things that are more important to me that are interesting, provide meaning to me, challenging, etc.
Having a nice paying job with relatively little work to do is something of a luxury, especially in this pandemic time where the economic toll is hitting many. So my unwarranted suggestion is to find something meaningful for yourself to do/experience even if your work isn't where it's at.. you probably will even have extra time to discover and pursue that since sounds like you're not so busy at work.