I've been able to, most of the time, work on (somewhat) novel problems, at least within the organizations I've been working, and certainly interesting ones to m

I've been able to, most of the time, work on (somewhat) novel problems, at least within the organizations I've been working, and certainly interesting ones to me. But I've always enjoyed tinkering on non-productive personal projects more. Exponentially so. I'm with you on most of the things sucking in software development. I spend so much time on shit. Politics, presentations to justify spending 0.000001% of our budget on things I need, convincing others that maybe we should leverage well established best practices, not even controversial or cutting edge kind, but the actual ones people everywhere use, rather than re-inventing the wheel every time. Right now I'm expected to inventory our software catalog, again, because someone doesn't want to get that information from the place we are using to already document it. And it's only Monday. This week will be long, so very long.