This is all true, I’ve seen it many times as well. But a note of caution I would sound for software developers who find themselves going through this cycle in a

This is all true, I’ve seen it many times as well. But a note of caution I would sound for software developers who find themselves going through this cycle in a business, because we technologists are often guilty of not matching our priorities to the business need. You join a company, and you explore their codebase, and of course you see dozens of obvious opportunities to improve. Abstractions that could unlock new capabilities, systems that don’t communicate that could be integrated, code that could be optimized, obvious user scenarios that were ignored or left unfinished. Yet the business keeps asking for other things to be done, ignoring these obvious low-hanging opportunities! What fools! Stop. Take a step back. Look at the numbers. It is often the case that the improvements you can see are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, but the business is pursuing hundreds of millions. There can be orders of magnitude of difference that, if you’re honest, mean that working on those obvious opportunities is a waste of time compared to the big picture. It can even be the case that a competitor shows up and seemingly validates one of those opportunities you’re foregoing - you, a frustrated developer, point to this upstart business building something and you say ‘look! We could have built that!’ Then you look closely and realize they’re making pennies in a tiny market and meanwhile your business grew by more than ten times their total revenue in the last year. Of course, I’m not saying it’s always right to ignore these opportunities; just that when you first join a company, you need to understand not just the technical space but also the business before you start proposing how to divert resources.