Congratulations for pursuing your dreams! I also work at a big game company, not even on a game but on an internal technology: no player will ever see directly

Congratulations for pursuing your dreams! I also work at a big game company, not even on a game but on an internal technology: no player will ever see directly the result of my contribution. I still feel great about my work because of reasons not important here, but I totally understand what the author says. But feeling of being a little cog in the machine aside, some of what is said here is about failure of management: communication problems, useless meetings, bogus decision process, lack of visibility of who is impacted by a decision, etc. It's true that big projects are more difficult to manage than small ones, but in truth a bad management or bad coworker dynamics can destroy motivation in big or small companies alike. I have worked in a few startups and two indie game companies and all were plagued by mismanagement as much if not more than my other experiences at a bank and at a big cell-phone company. I may have been unlucky, but it may a simple truth about the programmer's job: working with other people is hard and team dynamics is very important.