How is this the most upvoted comment? I get great joy out of being a great engineer at work. I LOVE solving hard problems and helping people. People at work using my tools or reading my documents brings me joy.
You can do this and release things! Do both!
Because ultimately a lot of corpo tech is ads bullshit or not nearly far enough from it.
Or it's healthcare bs. And not the cool kind where you help people (tremendous respect for doctors and nurses). The bs kind where you make it slightly more efficient to bill them into bankruptcy.
Or it's generic SaaS which is more or less the most you can hope to get to work on. (It's where I am).
Then there's reams of poorly paid positions where you software mill excel-adjacent LOB apps.
I agree with the sentiment of parent comment. Corporate programming sucks. If you have the opportunity to not be alienated from the product of your labor, do it.