1. Shuffling around credit between people and projects
2. "Getting by" enough to not be fired
3. Studying something of interest through the work
At competitive companies it's a lot of the first - everyone's looking for a way to take credit, which means there's a lot of performance anxiety and destructive power plays. Companies that are "coasting" see more of the second type, and this is roughly where you are in terms of mindset. It may be a dead end, but you will get paid for a while; of course this clashes if you are in a competitive team. But if the job involves an implict need to absorb stress or physical exertion, it can feel like plenty enough to get by.
But it's the third that is the only one that has some innate sense of contentment, and is always tied to those "dream jobs" and "dream projects" people seem to have, and the kind of drive that motivates high achieviment and immense technical ability. In a lot of cases it has to come from within; teams lacking leadership in this respect fall into coasting or bickering behavior, and society as a whole defaults to total indifference. So it can easily happen that you feel a purpose for a few years, then fall down for a while, then rediscover yourself. But you have to continuously have that purpose in mind to not get overly swept up in events.
It's almost certainly the case that you have something you want to study more deeply, and if you set yourself up to go down that path you would start to excel within months without feeling difficulty. But knowing it means knowing yourself and doing some deconstruction of the path you've followed so far. School-to-FAANG is a kind of life script, and all life scripts have a lack of "happily ever after" closure to them.
How do you do that deconstruction? There's no definite way, but it's a question that guides a lot of philosophy around virtue ethics and self development. So one way to go about this would be to get philosophical for a while, take a class, read some classics. Another is simply to push yourself a little to get out of your comfort zones and try out things you think you will struggle with. One of my favorite methods is simply to draw on the energy of high achievers in various fields and their biographies, interviews, etc. Live streams, by being so encompassing for long periods, can reveal a lot of underlying drive, attitude, etc. So I will often turn to gaming streams to see some of that.
1. Shuffling around credit between people and projects
2. "Getting by" enough to not be fired
3. Studying something of interest through the work
At competitive companies it's a lot of the first - everyone's looking for a way to take credit, which means there's a lot of performance anxiety and destructive power plays. Companies that are "coasting" see more of the second type, and this is roughly where you are in terms of mindset. It may be a dead end, but you will get paid for a while; of course this clashes if you are in a competitive team. But if the job involves an implict need to absorb stress or physical exertion, it can feel like plenty enough to get by.
But it's the third that is the only one that has some innate sense of contentment, and is always tied to those "dream jobs" and "dream projects" people seem to have, and the kind of drive that motivates high achieviment and immense technical ability. In a lot of cases it has to come from within; teams lacking leadership in this respect fall into coasting or bickering behavior, and society as a whole defaults to total indifference. So it can easily happen that you feel a purpose for a few years, then fall down for a while, then rediscover yourself. But you have to continuously have that purpose in mind to not get overly swept up in events.
It's almost certainly the case that you have something you want to study more deeply, and if you set yourself up to go down that path you would start to excel within months without feeling difficulty. But knowing it means knowing yourself and doing some deconstruction of the path you've followed so far. School-to-FAANG is a kind of life script, and all life scripts have a lack of "happily ever after" closure to them.
How do you do that deconstruction? There's no definite way, but it's a question that guides a lot of philosophy around virtue ethics and self development. So one way to go about this would be to get philosophical for a while, take a class, read some classics. Another is simply to push yourself a little to get out of your comfort zones and try out things you think you will struggle with. One of my favorite methods is simply to draw on the energy of high achievers in various fields and their biographies, interviews, etc. Live streams, by being so encompassing for long periods, can reveal a lot of underlying drive, attitude, etc. So I will often turn to gaming streams to see some of that.