Also, depending on the place, a lot of the dilbertesque politics and process are just having a safe/more conservative culture. Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production while you bleed $5k/minute and someone gets fired for it. Instead you blame the process and fix it methodically. That's arguably a lot better than cowbody devops.
At a startup, especially as a founder, you're encouraged to be a hero and give it your all partly because your incentives are really well aligned - if you succeed you could make $100mm or (a lot) more. As an employee, maybe you get fired or promoted, maybe your stock gains like 1% in value because of something you do or prevented... Some people are more checked out than others, but I agree, you're just an employee and it would be foolish to really put your heart and soul into your day job for most people
That is true to some extend for the employees’ motives, but the reality is that most just clearly don’t care beyond their paycheck or resume building.
Even the leadership doesn’t want to do what is best for the company/product, but what is best for themselves. It’ll be dressed up nicely of course, but that doesn’t change the reality of the thing.
> Instead you blame the process and fix it methodically.
You blame the process, but are unwilling to really change it, so you just keep repeating the same kind of fixes ad nauseam.
> Getting buy in, satisfying stakeholders, making sure the safe happy protocol is followed - it's so you don't end up in a situation where a junior engineer is tasked with fixing production
Its also so you can get the thing you really want by sacrificing the thing you don't care about. You get to maintain longer term relationships which lowers people's defensiveness and allows you to move more liquid through the pipes because there aren't people limiting your flow out of defensiveness or because they don't believe in what you're doing.
At a startup, especially as a founder, you're encouraged to be a hero and give it your all partly because your incentives are really well aligned - if you succeed you could make $100mm or (a lot) more. As an employee, maybe you get fired or promoted, maybe your stock gains like 1% in value because of something you do or prevented... Some people are more checked out than others, but I agree, you're just an employee and it would be foolish to really put your heart and soul into your day job for most people