> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements, following new rules or regulations, incorporating products from merges, maintaining technology up to date with new releases... nothing feels important and nothing feels challenging. At the same time, your company fails if it is not done. Quality is also incredible important, to break a tiny component may send thousands of companies around the world spinning.

This is part of it, but it's also true that in a lot of massive enterprises there is an absurd amount of inefficiency that leads to people effectively having nothing to do.

I had one such role at Splunk, pre-acquisition, which had a mere ~2k or so employees at the time. My entire office was effectively doing nothing; we were the result of another acquisition and management had no idea what to do with us. More hours were logged at the foosball and ping-pong tables than in front of an IDE. I'm not even exaggerating. I left after 9 months because I was bored; I did not write a single line of code that got used in any real application, internal or external.

When I went to AWS, it was closer to what you're describing; it took a lot of work to do seemingly very small changes for the reasons you mention. But I would never say that my team there had too many employees doing not enough work; everyone was busy all the time, it just took a lot of work to do very small changes.

No thank you. I worked in multiple startups and they inherited the worst cancers of big tech: moving slowly, decisions by committees, leveling (in one startup, the founder decided to have six engineering levels in a company with less than 10 engineers). Compound with low pay and erratic behavior of founders, I had seen more than enough.

> When you work for stablished company most of the work is refinements

At what point is a company established? I recall that the early years of Google, it produced not only Search but also Gmail, Maps, Translate, Android, and Chrome. That was all between 1998-2008. At what point did most of Google's work become refinements?

My point being, it is a culture issue. Google could have become "established" and focus on "refinements" after Search. Or Gmail. Or Maps. Or Translate. But each of those times, it did not.

I work in oil and gas manufacturing and we are slow dinosaurs when it comes to adapting or using new technology.

Recently we've hired a few startups for PoCs regarding to data analytics and they all get deeply frustrated at the pace it takes us to even agree basic details.

Yeah, at least in the pre-AI times I was writing way less code than in my startup days. but like 10 to 1000x people actually interacted with them.

OP might have been stuck in a dept that is winding down to prep for a layoff or something. I probably would have stuck around unless I found a different role. Who knows, you might just get some severance.

> following new rules or regulations

I'm ISO27001'ing my company and I wonder if some day, we'll find a better way than written policies, procedures, forms, evidence and audits. To me, it seems like our current world's biggest flaw: We're losing 2/3rd of our workforce to maintaining procedures, they make the work boring and unbearable, and they're not even efficient, even if they do provide upside in systematically organizing things. Standards (when pushed to procedures, forms and audite) are the regression-to-the-mean of collective organizations.