There's a lot of programming gigs in the public sector or in larger boring organisations. They pay less but are also have lower expectations and more structure which are both great
No PTSD but dealing with burn out I needed to find something else, and that's what I tried. So far it's paying off.
Could it be people are choosing over-engineered solutions because AWS has bad documentation and that's what the solutions architects tell them to do?
Could it be because microservices and so-called "server-less" have been sold as cost-saving measures that increase the business' flexibility and decrease capital investment?
When... in reality a single deployed Docker container is way more manageable than a distributed system constructed with "lambdas" and requires fewer engineers in the long run?
What I'm trying to say is that FAANG cargo-culting is only part of why developers choose to build solutions that scale larger than they need. Another large part is the cloud development ecosystem writ-large and the consulting culture that has built up around it.
You sound like a very competitive person. You might want to consider that a lot of software development is actually the navigation of socio-technical systems. Heavy emphasis on the socio. Your competitive drive isn't bad, but it might lead you to local optima in your career in the long-run.
How do you get things done in a larger organization? At AWS it's solved by having APIs and documentation for everything. This leads to a janky UI, a lot of redundancy in their systems, and a pretty bad work environment from what I hear.
In a lot of technical organizations, this problem is solved instead informally through relationships between members of the organization. You want to get something done outside of your constrained contexts? You'll probably need some relationships. Getting a lot of cards done is great, but if you're pushing too hard all the time you're going to sour those relationships.
What I'm saying boils down to this: being a developer in a large organization is about 1-3 parts coding to 7-9 parts communication and relationships. Further, if you spend time communicating you can often realize that the feature you're implementing was already implemented two years ago and there's just a regression that's caused the line of code to no longer be executed.
You can say fuck it to the communications with your peers if you'd like. However, keep in mind that most of your jobs as you become senior are going to come from referrals from former colleagues. Your boss right now isn't going to help you get your next job–the people sitting around you might.
I stopped using Firefox because it was killing my battery life. Also because I noticed more and more websites stopped supporting it and I just kind of gave up. I'm using Safari these days and it's fine.