MBA's cause all the problems and take all the credit.

Some manager jumps on a hype train and makes objectively insane claims. AI will nullify latency across the Internet! Engineers are stuck holding the bag. Modern tech stacks are all terrible complex things that evolved mostly by accident and you spend half your time just bashing your head against YAML interfaces between CI bullshit leftover from some hype cycle before you joined the company, to tickle a package manager to stick somewhere that automake will detect it that depends on some shim written in Perl because "New automagic thing XYZ" doesn't actually solve all of your process issues, it just adds a layer on top of them so you can have new categories of process issues.

So you spend a good day futzing around with process junk, accomplishing nothing, on a project that can't work and serves no purpose, trying to add a feature that nobody needs and nobody but your boss wants, which will add bloat and make your process problems even worse next cycle. But at least you might commit a change to a file in source control and feel like you did something related to the job you signed up for, even if the accomplishment made the world objectively a worse place.

Or you spend a bad day not even getting to futz with a YAML file at a computer because you are in meetings all day. The company got bought and you need to get indoctrinated into the new Strategic Branding Initiative. Or you are getting yelled at because AI isn't a solution to latency and you have written the YAML config to change the fucking laws of physics. Or you are getting yelled at because the bloat they made you add last cycle is slowing down your work this cycle.

So you burn out knowing your work is pointless, it can't be good no matter how hard you work or what you accomplish. You realize it's all pointless. Just wheels within wheels of bullshit MBA's that are too dumb to know they are lying to each other. And it's not just your job that is broken, it seems to be the whole god damned world is run exclusively by emperors wearing no clothes. Eventually you give up on the idea that the grass is even greener on the other side of the fence. Your current pointless nothing existence isn't even building up your resume to eventually work on something cool because even if you did land a prestigious job at a FAANG, you'd just be bloating some Android app users beg you to stop futzing with, adding more whitespace to the UI by removing features, and bloating the package size adding AI for no reason to serve your boss's career plan to use six months of your life adding one buzzword to your boss's LinkedIn profile because they think it'll be useful for their next career move. But the hype cycle will probably be over by then, so your boss will stay and force you to bloat the app with the next buzzword because your boss has the planning approach of a gambling addict.

Investors believe the bullshit and dump billions of dollars onto stupid nonsense. You could do more good for the world sitting at home on the sofa with a dildo up your ass than the guy who gets $100 Million dollars to build obviously scam NFT based games that claim they'll pay you to play, because of obviously scam claims about crypto. All of the money flows to bad things. Trying to do anything actually good from either an engineering or a social perspective has horrific negative economic value. So you realize if you care about your career your self worth is going to wind up being based on how bad you want to be. So the optimal approach is just to be miserable and give up on caring about your career or thinking there's any sort of future or hope or long term plan.

And somebody expects you should be happy about it?