Lol. I took the teaching job because I was bored with "software assembly" (nice name). It was fun to get drop shipped into a random location in the world and go

Lol. I took the teaching job because I was bored with "software assembly" (nice name). It was fun to get drop shipped into a random location in the world and go toe-to-toe with their best and brightest. I've since moved on to embedded development, and it is as you say. I've recently got to work on tensorflow light, pytorch, rust, object detection, compute shaders... it's amazing. The big company stuff can be a bit boring, but I can also say there's some pride even in the "glue". The team I was most proud of implemented Heroku-flow in their proprietary cloud using some kick-ass devops skills, figured out some innovative ways to solidly test their creation, and also got to write a genuinely comp-sci database diff tool to migrate data nightly from the original thing into their re-write. If you can build the trust, there's most often a good route to turn a terrible, untrusting, corporate monstrosity into something decent. But that being said, it takes a ton of passion and also sometimes it will just be dull and a hobby project is probably a necessary relief valve.