I have been working at a FAANG company on a team that has a pretty interesting product. I feel that most of my time, however, is sucked up doing things that no longer about coding or building a successful product. Every new feature we want to release takes so much time, and I'm starting to feel like I have limited impact on the overall outlook of the product. The unfulfilled-ness is starting to get to me and I am losing ideas for a creative outlet. I have tried coding in my free-time, but have just run out of projects that interest me. Sorry about the complaining, but I am reaching out to see if anyone else has been in a similar rut and has suggestions for getting out of it.
You are not hired to have fun, coding new cool exciting stuff. You are probably getting paid to maintain a product and keeping it running, stable and bug free, to keep customers happy thus earning the company money. Just a guess of course. But that's the reality for most developers.
First and foremost, software is not the be-all-end-all of your life and frankly everything else in the world.<p>Find something you enjoy that's not software and then apply software to it. Model rocketry? Juggling? Etc.