Absolutely. I often feel bored, depressed, and anxious being a corporate software developer. It crushes my soul that we coddle junior developers so extensively

Absolutely. I often feel bored, depressed, and anxious being a corporate software developer. It crushes my soul that we coddle junior developers so extensively instead of mentor them and that coddling defines everything from product quality to what code we are allowed to write and how fast we are allowed to ship it. I was recently mobilized in the Army reserves to a deployment in Kuwait where I am a junior director in charge of help desk operations for a large military command. I am a late arrival to the unit. When I got here morale was low, productivity was low, things were falling through the cracks. Now things are really turning around. I am working 70-80 hours per week and it’s great. I building new software products that auto prioritize the work. The team sees the progress they are making in terms of numbers from day to day. Productivity is up and working harder with necessary direction has caused morale to jump up. The military thing is less pay for longer hours but it’s so much more fulfilling to know we can set our own short term goals and crush them. I get to use my software skills to produce products that influence my leadership style and advertise team success in raw numbers. There is nobody complaining about how hard life is to slow me down. Since I am allowed to produce products at my own speed and since software product creation is generally foreign to the military my team is able to influence and empower its own success in a way others cannot and seeing that success in real time has been awesome. Deployments are temporary though and I know I have to go back to dicking around with slow application code and large incompetent frameworks in the corporate world. About the last month of a deployment gets super depressing.