Don't get me wrong I'm not looking down on anyone looking for a less intense job. Plenty of slave-driving middle managers out there that bring all the wrong types of intensity to a job and are worth leaving. Even with good management working your 40 and clocking out is a fine way to fly assuming the 40 hours is productive. People have different priorities in life and that's fine.
But at my current workplace most of our time is wasted on maintaining and occasionally being forced to exacerbate inefficiencies, rather than working toward eliminating them. Just to name a few examples: All of our package dependencies are managed by hand with no time/money in the budget to implement any sort of automated dependency management, the software itself is hacked together from several pieces of internal corporate software that were never originally intended to work together and thus have a ton of redundancies, the hierarchy (or lack thereof) of the various software teams is WAY too loose to enforce good organization, and the infrastructure is begged, borrowed and stolen. All of this and more is what generates most of the "work" that gets done. Most of the time we're either putting out fires or treading water, or adding new features over the objections of senior engineers and then ripping them out when they don't work (so serious money does exist, just for all the wrong things).
The only reason any of this makes money at all is because it's a very specific niche we've cornered and like it or not we're the only functional game in town. In theory it should be an important mission, that's what attracted me to it in the first place. Sadly the powers that be don't give a damn.
But at my current workplace most of our time is wasted on maintaining and occasionally being forced to exacerbate inefficiencies, rather than working toward eliminating them. Just to name a few examples: All of our package dependencies are managed by hand with no time/money in the budget to implement any sort of automated dependency management, the software itself is hacked together from several pieces of internal corporate software that were never originally intended to work together and thus have a ton of redundancies, the hierarchy (or lack thereof) of the various software teams is WAY too loose to enforce good organization, and the infrastructure is begged, borrowed and stolen. All of this and more is what generates most of the "work" that gets done. Most of the time we're either putting out fires or treading water, or adding new features over the objections of senior engineers and then ripping them out when they don't work (so serious money does exist, just for all the wrong things).
The only reason any of this makes money at all is because it's a very specific niche we've cornered and like it or not we're the only functional game in town. In theory it should be an important mission, that's what attracted me to it in the first place. Sadly the powers that be don't give a damn.