I love my job FWIW. I work at performance engineering and we work with the most complex systems in the world (GB200/B300/...). Couldn't be happier.

But I just don't care if I have 5 layers of abstraction and SOLID principles and clean code and.... bah. I get it. I have an MSc in it and I've been doing this as a hobby and then professionally for decades now. It just doesn't matter. At the end of the day, we get paid to ship something that solves a problem.

It might be a novel problem. And it might be at the frontier of what we can do today. But it's still a problem that needs solving and the path we take is irrelevant from a user's perspective as long as it solves the problem.