How it was 20-10 years ago: you have to learn hard, work hard to get into the top league, have a chance not only to

* close your financial issues for life, but what is more important, get a chance to

* work with the best of the best, creme de la creme engineers on (what’s arguably is even more important)

* unique, ambitios, challenging and very valuable problems.

What I see now both from inside of some companies (big and small, startups or not), and from outside of some others. You leetcode (or cheat-code, as in “game the system”) yourself into what is supposed to be a prestigious org and get:

* with rare exceptions (unless you were born a savant or 1mil dollar lottery winner level of lucky, you don’t get those), no really challenging unsolved problems. Your job is whatever level you are is just keep plates spinning, or fight your way through thick archeological layers of (mostly terrible) code just to deliver a minor feature that half of the time was not worth it and gonna be deprecated soon, leaving another layer of fossilized feces for the next lucky one. Not to mention all mental, emotional and meeting time waste sacrifices to make that happen. And everyday challenges are solved either by throwing more kafka partitions at it or constantly changing roadmaps to accommodate the messed up reality on the ground

* No matter how many or how little smart people are in the company - you don’t learn much because mediocre people have nothing to share (they google and gpt same prompts as you), and hi level one’s don’t have enough freedom to shine and are crippled by bureaucracy, previous issue and next issue. Companies try hard to hire 10s, but use them at their level of capacity and skills 4 at best.

* Top to mid level management are mostly hired workforce without a vision, without a genuine passion. Incentivized not by end product quality or value, or innovation, or anything like that, but rather by imitating a hard work while playing it safe. By building a good looking CV to get more bonuses in the next role. Scared to make tough decisions, take any risks, or even do “the right” thing or at least to have humility to get in touch with reality (actual customers and developers on the ground). Just go whatever the wind is blowing today.

* projects rarely have a sense of direction, sense of urgency, sense of value. Utterly meaningless. You’re not motivated by building a product or delivering a value. You try to live through the next review cycle and learn to imitate importance and showing off professionally enough to beg for promotion. Due to the scarcity of true opportunities to grow.

* With all that - you don’t hit the jackpot anymore. You are not financially safe. Even layoffs aside in current economy you make just enough to barely call yourself a middle class. If you’re alone. Family, kids, mortgage, no rich parents, real estate from grandma? Now be happy if you make ends meet.

Is this me or that sounds close to what you see from your corner of the industry?

Whether your picture is the same or different — please share why do you think it is, how did we come to this upside down (or whatever your angle) reality?

Asking for a friend.