At a 10k company that didn't originate in tech but obviously had to get software devs eventually, it was similar. Most of my day was spent wondering whether I messed up something about docker again or the super restrictive proxy server just messed things up again. Just run the script a couple times to be sure it's not just the proxy. Then open ticket with network team. Maybe have it resolved two weeks later. In general it was mostly just asking for stuff to be allowed to be accessed. Even when you had three things to work on that were somewhat not dependent on each other there were times where you just had nothing to do. And then when you finally can access whatever it was it takes you two days to get back into what you were actually doing there.
On the positive side, it was mostly relaxed, I could think about side projects and actually work on them after work, even though I "worked" more hours than the job after that. I think that's what kept me sane, but it was very refreshing to switch to a small company after that where you could get things done and generally mostly dealt with motivated folks you can get along with.
Worst story so far was from a high school friend who joined a 600k employees monstrosity. Getting almost nothing done because every fart needs to be approved but in addition a very toxic environment with lots of unnecessary conflict and dickery between different teams whenever they had to cooperate on something. Now it's a huge company and probably not all of it is like that, but boy I don't understand how he's still there and not completely dead inside or became an actual psychopath.
On the positive side, it was mostly relaxed, I could think about side projects and actually work on them after work, even though I "worked" more hours than the job after that. I think that's what kept me sane, but it was very refreshing to switch to a small company after that where you could get things done and generally mostly dealt with motivated folks you can get along with.
Worst story so far was from a high school friend who joined a 600k employees monstrosity. Getting almost nothing done because every fart needs to be approved but in addition a very toxic environment with lots of unnecessary conflict and dickery between different teams whenever they had to cooperate on something. Now it's a huge company and probably not all of it is like that, but boy I don't understand how he's still there and not completely dead inside or became an actual psychopath.