I love corporate, boring, "soul-crushing" work. Why? Because I can sit down, whip out a basic CRUD form with a small approval cycle in a day. It saves a company 100K over the year, I am loved by the customers, and because it is so simple, it normally requires no maintenance. Maybe we update the fields once a year or so.
At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a critical asset to the company.
After 3 years, I've optimized everything, the ROI slows down, and I move on.
This pattern is not a tragedy. It doesn't crush your soul. It makes you a prized commodity in the business world, with a chance to make a change in your life every few years.
I have usually alternated between 3 years doing this, then 2 years doing startup work. It has given me a much broader base of experience and skill than anyone who stick to one one side of the coin.
It also has given me years of experience in large industries (banking, energy, etc.) which I then use to find very real problems to which a startup can be applied.
I have led a very satisfying career, doing this for almost 20 years now.
I find that pretty interesting, and quite the opposite of my experience. I'm guessing that it has to do with the size of the boring corporation.
I worked for a mega corp, and redtape and layers upon layers of bureaucracy would pretty much make any project take months instead of a day. Additionally, there were plenty of times where the right arm was working on something and the left arm didn't know about it, so it was also working on the same thing. Finally, the customers didn't really know what they wanted, the databases weren't designed properly by a solid DBA, and really good system architects weren't brought on early in the design, which resulted in an extremely poor working applications.
All-in-all, it was definitely soul-crushing, and I personally have no desire to do it again. YMMV.
I'll add in that I expect 90% of enterprise programming is maintaining someone else's code. It isn't making small CRUD apps, it isn't innovating, it isn't bringing costs down, it isn't bringing profits up.
It is simply maintaining the behemoth they spent a fortune on N years ago which was over-, under- and poorly designed all at the same time. It is just keeping it working well enough that it can continue being used because as long as it is working there's no reason to rewrite it. The words "rewrite" to an executive mean, "do a lot of work and spend a lot of money to make something we already have."
And there will have been non-FizzBuzz programmers working on that project before you.
Corporate work has a lot more to do with the relationships than with the work itself. That's the most important take-away. It's not about how much math you know or what data structures you use. It's how you get along with the guys (and gals) you're doing the work for. You want people who are smart enough to understand that what you're doing is important, but humble enough not to think of what you do as "grunt work" that they could do just as well, and decent enough not to try to "trap" you or to browbeat you into doing as much work for as little as possible.
I'm also not a fan of the "hostage employer" situation. It's a way to get a steady paycheck, but also a toxic relationship that kills you slowly. Better to do the best work you can so that if your client wants to let you go, he can.
If you're doing "boring" corporate work for people you like (and not all "business people" are assholes; it's about half IME) then it can be fun. You do great work for them in a small amount of time, and they pay you well and are happy to have you.
I've met a lot of consultants who can make this work really well. When you choose your clients and don't have a manager-as-career-SPOF, you can develop positive relationships like what you described.
A more important thing is you won't really need much of those data structures and algorithms for nearly 99% of the tasks that your are likely to do in any large corporate/typical business driven software today. Most of the data structures that you will need are covered by the standard tool kit that comes with the language. Most of your common sorting and searching needs come covered with the libraries.
But you sort of need to have other skills, like productivity , delivering extra value to business etc.
Also I don't see why all that is wrong. After all software there is written to make money. And if something helps you do that with ease. It's perfectly OK. You don't have to always take the most difficult path to prove you are good. Doing what is required to 'get things done' is just good enough.
At the end of the week, I've already saved the company more than my salary. After a year, I am a critical asset to the company.
After 3 years, I've optimized everything, the ROI slows down, and I move on.
This pattern is not a tragedy. It doesn't crush your soul. It makes you a prized commodity in the business world, with a chance to make a change in your life every few years.
I have usually alternated between 3 years doing this, then 2 years doing startup work. It has given me a much broader base of experience and skill than anyone who stick to one one side of the coin. It also has given me years of experience in large industries (banking, energy, etc.) which I then use to find very real problems to which a startup can be applied.
I have led a very satisfying career, doing this for almost 20 years now.