I dodged all of this hard by taking an interview with a smaller engineering-adjacent company. A lot of these points seem like the reality when working at a giga

I dodged all of this hard by taking an interview with a smaller engineering-adjacent company. A lot of these points seem like the reality when working at a gigantic conglomerate that doesn't take its software arm very seriously. Mine does because the software analysis is the core product. 1) All of my previous practice and my Master's-level statistics and signals processing prepared me well for this job. 2) Out of the gate, my boss gave me free reign to greenfield replace a lot of old tools. 3) My clean code and the documentation around it is needed, because obfuscated and undocumented code is what previously shot this company in the foot, and is what I was replacing. 4) Everyone in the software part of the company is competent; the only issues come from outside our department. 5) We have one one-hour weekly meeting to talk progress and potentially connect on important points. Everything else we discuss as needed. 6) Estimates are rarely needed because I made the right choice of languages and tools. I can make changes or add features same-day or within a couple days. One longer-term project I'm on has no deadline; it's needed, but not urgently. 7) My choice of language and tools makes bugs easy to track down. Most of my issues are solving for engineering edge cases. 8) Not that I'm always certain, but uncertainty is never really an issue here. 9) I hard disconnect from my job, and my boss wants it that way. Nobody has my email or phone number. When I go home, I go home. 10) I've had soft skills my whole life, so I've never run into that issue. I didn't get the fabled six-figure starting salaries people everywhere seem to be chasing, but I've concluded those aren't truly real and were driven by $2 trillion money-printing valuations. If anyone is curious about my tools, I use Nim to analyze signal data and output analysis and reports; it's a CLI tool that puts out standardized data formats, which can be invoked by server scripts whenever needed. Most of our systems have already been overhauled to use it as the crux of our data analysis. I replaced a lot of old deliberately obfuscated C and PHP.