Almost getting burned out and WFH really changed me as a person. At my first job, I drank the consultancy kool-aid and thought I was a big girl making lots of money and doing cool stuff. That was until I caught myself thinking “does anyone at work care if I 'accidentally' fell in front of a train?”. I also realized that, no matter how ambitious someone was, it all came down to how management wanted to improve their own status with national and international management.
My second job (2021) was at a much smaller company where, no matter how hard I worked to fix everyone else's shit code, I wouldn't get more than an inflation correction. It was a titanic sized project waiting to hit an iceberg.
At my current job, an international company again, I couldn't give two shits about anyone beyond my team. Tomorrow the whole department is invited to meet up for some kind of quarterly department goal discussion in tge office
Fuck that, I'm not going to spend gas and parking money to be the only available team member there. I have no interest in these people beyond their potential feature request. Until they have one, I'll (yet again) be busy with unfucking fucked up code fron before I joined tge company.