My job is anything but straight-forward in a large org. I have witnessed entire departments or "orgs" sit idle for almost a year while management did a huge dan

My job is anything but straight-forward in a large org. I have witnessed entire departments or "orgs" sit idle for almost a year while management did a huge dance to figure out the budget. This involved a lot of reliance on various lower lever employees. Once that was done, finally, we then began the process of figuring out how to spend the money fast enough in the time we had left until the next budget-dance--fast approaching. I was an engineer (high level but still) and spent most of my time helping management not look like complete idiots to their managers. When it came to actual engineering I had to beg the help of so many shared services that I rarely knew how to proceed. It usually came down to finding someone who had been there their whole career to find out which one of their friends knew how to initiate some process...to get an EC2 instance in AWS. High degree of chaos and stress and nothing of real value got done. To top it all off, when you find out who your customer is you realize they are guilty of war crimes. I went there to build data pipelines for high volume telemetry. I sort of worked on that, but not really. I met numerous people who lamented that they would look back on their career and be able to say they went to some meetings. It is not healthy, on many levels. "Psychologically difficult" is a very diplomatic take.