Something similar happened to me with a client whose codebase took up to an hour to rebuild from scratch. Certain code changes would cause the build system to t

Something similar happened to me with a client whose codebase took up to an hour to rebuild from scratch. Certain code changes would cause the build system to take anywhere from 5 mins to 45 mins to do a partial rebuild. It was agonizing not knowing how long the code would take to build. I found that role extremely unproductive, and draining like you describe. The build system was arcane and convoluted (CMake), requiring days or weeks of dedicated study to understand well enough to make improvements. Obviously our team was never given the time to do that, so we were all stuck in this hateful build-test-fix cycle. I've learned to value companies and clients that place the developer experience very high in the pecking order of things to work on.