It's pretty shit. The constantly shifting priorities means we're in an endless loop of making no progress on the main project, which is just a business management app.

If you identify yourself to your work outcome it sucks your soul, but if you don’t you become nihilistic so it’s all about finding the balance. More seriously it depends a lot on team/project/management but mostly you gotta really like troubleshooting, translating requirements+caffeine into code and defend/discuss your decisions. Working on a fresh clean codebase tends to be much more satisfying.

Speaking from the more sysadmin side of things it can certainly feel that some days. Particularly with the never ending wave of half baked saas apps that my org seems to love acquiring.

lol those are actually two seperate Le Guin novels (The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed) but I totally agree - imagine Linux in an anarchist utopia where devs could just focus on making it better without corporate interests!