In many ways, it's about where you are in any company

In many ways, it's about where you are in any company. If you're in a business critical, mature project with massive risk controls to prevent anything from going haywire, it's going to seem slow, since you'll (for instance) end up spending 5 hours running tests, formal verification and such to ensure that you're 5 line change doesn't break the system. If, on the other hand, you're in the new Skunkworks division, trying to figure out how the competition could upend the entire market, you might get less defined, less bureaucratic work. I've seen both in some of the oldest and largest companies I've worked for, but even the Skunkworks stuff is really different from startup world. Many of those projects are filled with workplace politics about who's positioned to be promoted to Senior Vice President of New Technologies and AI and who's going to be shown the door for having wasted $50million on something that can never make it to market, or even more esoteric things that only make sense in the context of the giant organization. …