I can't know where you're working or worked, but please don't think that this is every tech job in every company. There are plenty of smaller businesses doing great work where you get to have your say, good colleagues and some (at least) moderately interesting problems to work with.
My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.
Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.
I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.
I have always worked with smaller companies as a rule, somewhere between 5-30 people usually. I don't live in the valley, so the startup game isn't even on my radar, and the companies are already making money solving problems so all the VC infused "Change the World" attitude isn't required. I don't have to care about IPOs, stock options or whatever.
There are still so many interesting problems to solve at smaller companies, often really niche problems that have no or little prior art meaning you get to really break ground. You are also tailoring software to work on problem sets of an entirely different domain to software. In FAANG style companies you're writing software that solves software problems, which is a layer of abstraction too far for me personally.
Being smaller companies they're often involved in the community as well. Software is so often ephemeral and disconnected, there have been years of my career where I never spoke to anyone who actually used my work. I'm not sure the client always tested it either, so it could feel like I was writing software for no-one. It is nice to be connected to the real world and users/clients more directly.
My last 3 jobs (over 10 years) have all been with companies in the size of 30-50 people, with 20-50% being product/engineering, working on a SaaS product. My jobs have been nothing remotely like the Silicon Valley TV-series, so I'm quite surprised and appalled when people say how spot on (even if it's a mocking caricature) the show is. And your description of Dilbertesque politics fall very much in that same category.
Will smaller companies have the Big Engineering Problems that FAANG companies have? Of course not. But there's a huge middle ground in lots of different sectors. I'm working for a company that makes a platform for childcare centers, and we have a ton of challenges and opportunities - not what I'd expected 10 years ago. But the work is rewarding, even if I don't get to have a lot of challenges revolving super hard algorithms, huge data sets or whatever else might be all the rage. Most of our challenges is scaling on a budget, nurturing expertise in different areas in a 10-person team, translating feature requests between customer lingo to something we can implement, and many more similar not-wild-and-crazy tasks.
I do feel lucky, but I also do not feel like I was lucky and somehow found three magical unicorn companies to work for. And there's plenty of things that could be better, and I could make more money working at bigger companies but in my mind it's not worth the trade-off.