I came across an interesting article today. It's called Why Older People Struggle In Programming Jobs written by Adam Nathaniel Davis. There are several sections to this article around dealing with office politics, tech churn, fanboys, and the cookie-cutter-ing of software.

One of the most soul-sucking trends in dev over the last decade-plus has been the constant effort to reduce programming to some sort of assembly line kinda process. Although I can understand the desire to refine a complex process into a simpler one, the end result of these efforts is that the programmers often end up being treated like... assembly line workers.

Adam Nathaniel Davis

This quote spoke to me because a few of my last few jobs have felt like this. It might have more to do with joining a team while a project is in flight as opposed to getting onboard before the project starts. When you come on to a team with a project already running, you are busy trying to learn the system that has been built, not make any breaking changes, and still deliver value for the client.

There are a bunch more interesting tidbits in this article and I think it's definitely worth the time to give it a read.