I currently work on software in automotive. Everything seems completely insane. We have tons of process and technical debt, executives that are super out of touch and all have their own pet projects, we have hundreds of executives so we have 100 number one priority pet projects, we have a very distributed hardware/software footprint due to the affirmationed process/technical debt, each vehicle has a different hardware footprint which means we constantly have to make our distributed software work when a piece of the software needs to be rebuilt in a new controller, etc etc.

There's also the whole mess of trying to run agile at scale, managinga very distributed backlog, trying to balance priorities across teams that have to coordinate work, everyone leading with "how they want it" instead of "what they want", total disregard for WIP limits, etc.

I know where I work is a shit show. I really wonder if it's much better elsewhere. I also wonder if this place has always been a shit show and I just have more exposure to it now.

And yeah, alcohol. I'm trying to cut back but the mood here seems to violently oscillate between "this is OK" to "what the hell" and back again. We're probably due for another swing soon.

Some days I do think about going back to waiting tables. It took me years of working elsewhere to stop having the waiting weeds dreams though...