I've been working in big financial companies most of my 10 YOE career. Things haven't been too well lately, I'm SWE however half of my time is wasted on raising/following up and responding to tickets, emails and other red tape fluff. I barely get to do any development work anymore and when I do - it's wrapped into so many specs, agile practices and meetings that even trivial changes become a drag. Hell, mundane bugfixing and even digging through logs to fix incident in stage env are exciting compared to the rest.
WLB is great, at least on paper - 9 to 6.
When sh*t hits the fan I can work overtime or until late night (e.g. until 3-4am) fir several days with no issues and I like it because at moments like this bureocracy takes a backseat everything becomes about getting actual work done.
But generally by the end of the day I feel like squeezed 🍋.
I was considering to move to startup or smaller company where I could be a normal developer again. I was thinking what if it would be even crazier there and I'd burn out in a month.
Has anyone tried to move from BigCorp to small company? What was it like?
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No but really, government work is the same. It doesn't hurt to try. Don't worry about being too old, in college one of my classmates was a 50+ year old woman, I've heard someone hear say one of their entry level Google SWEs was 40+, etc there's always room for for more in today's age and there's no reason you can't get a piece of the pie too.
To quote Buzz Lightyear, reach for the stars. Good luck