I have that feeling trying to improve dev practices in a shop that had none. Years of effort and we’re barely at the point my previous place was at before I even started there.
Why care? The only reason I point stuff out at my current company is because I don't want to get on a performance improvement plan because of their dumb work forecasting solutions
Caring about your work and work environment can make time spent working a lot more fulfilling. Which isn't to say every company or every manager inspires such sentiment, but if you can find a way to care about your work, and/or find work that you care about, it's definitely more pleasant than just doing the minimum to collect pay.
Nothing is worse then when you care, and apparently all the code written/test/work done 3 months by team goes straight to the trash, no explanation.
Simply some exec in this large thought that it should go to trash, couldn't even give me a reason.
I quickly quit after that.
Believe me, it's far worse when everybody working on it thinks it should go in the trash, but everybody is still working on it because some exec in this large org thinks it still has promise year after year.
I've been on both sides of that, and while I appreciate execs that know how to give a project room to breath and find their footing, I also appreciate execs that know when to tear the bandaid off.
If he can spend time at work doing things he likes to do then why not? He could have spent that time churning out features instead, but now he got to clean up a codebase, some people like doing that sort of thing.
I can imagine caring about something like that if it was impending something important (say, it was about developing software that is part of court system/curing cancer/doing something that I consider personally important).
Or they are paid specifically for that, or they just spend they work hours on that.
Hopefully they are not spending unpaid overtime on that (unless they consciously volunteer to help with something important, not with widget marketing)
Ugh. I feel you. I left my last job in large part because I concluded that I had done as much as I ever would be able to in terms of improving things. Staying would just have led to increasing frustration. Better off leaving when I could feel good about the improvements that I made.
That is basically 90% of business line software that is built to support workflows and processes.
Employees don’t want the process, company wants process. Everyone building these is miserable and usually requirements are to actively make user lives miserable instead of easier.
Maybe I've been exceptionally lucky (although I've been very conscious to only work for SMEs which I think has a lot to do with it), but I always try really hard to figure out what the user/customer is actually trying to achieve, then what's the best way to get there using the resources available, regardless of any incumbent processes or strategy. To my mind this is the best of both worlds - I've got the satisfaction of making something great and the customer gets their life made easier.
As I've gone through my career I've focused less and less on some specific language or technology stack that is the flavour of the day, and I get my satisfaction from engineering a robust solution from whatever is the must appropriate technology in that specific case.
On a less happy note, there are definitely jobs I've had where I felt like nobody wanted what I was making and its kind of miserable