How do I get in on this? For the 10 years I've been in this industry I've never been in a job where I felt like I had it easy. It's always been a rush to get one project done then there's always something else in the pipeline. Whether those projects are actually worth doing is a different question...
Careful what you wish for. It's not "easy" at places like that. It's just different. Instead of your work being keeping a system up and running putting out fires or implementing features or coming up with algorithms on a tight schedule... it's, instead: figuring out who is doing what, what you're supposed to be doing, what permissions list you need to be on in order to access X system, asking to be on that list and waiting, submitting a minor feature to code review that takes a week to go through because someone didn't check their email, rewriting a major part of the code in that review because someone came in at the last minute and didn't like some thing about it that was actually decided on weeks ago but they weren't looped in.
The amount of actual lines of code written by an average SWE at a BigCorp is miniscule. The amount of churn and spinning and hand wringing that goes into that code is staggering. But it's like that for a reason. There's just a lot of people.
It's torture, and in order to maintain productivity you need to have about 5-6 of these processes running concurrently, and it's why you get paid a lot of money to do it.
Do poorly at juggling that and making "progress"? Find yourself on the receiving end of a performance review where the label "meets expectations" actually means "you better start kicking ass at this, or you'll find yourself with no stock refresh grants for next year."
All the money and free food and so on is just a salve to try to make the whole thing less unpleasant. Some people get a high out of the process, while it drives other people slowly crazy.
(In my last months at Google the only part of the job I "enjoyed" was the week I was on-call for the first time on my new team. Because it was the only time in over a year where I felt useful even though it was quite stressful. That's how I knew it was time to pack it in)
Manager pay correlates with how many reports they have. So all of them are incentivised to making it look like their team is spread thin, so even if you don't have to work hard he will make you work hard so that he can tell his manager that he needs more headcount.
Become a contractor or even more so a consultant. You'll often find yourself on dysfunctional teams where management barely knows what they want and things often never get done.
I wouldn't recommend it though since it's soul crushing.
They don't have it easy either. They have to demonstrate at least once a year that they've "accomplished" something in spite of an entire organization of gates that make accomplishing anything nearly impossible. But they still have to figure out a way to do it, and it still has to be somehow represent enough to justify their pay.
It might sound exciting but its actually super depressing. You get paid mad $$ and in ur head ur think "what the ef are these idiots paying us for?". I ended up leaving just because it made me feel so useless i couldn't handle it anymore.
