To be candid, even though my jobs have time to tinker, I don’t want to fight with Product or Management to get improvements into prod.

Took me half a year to get them to value Sentry, lol.

I’ll just collect my check and go do something else.

Exactly the situation in pretty much every company I worked at in the last 10 years.

Fighting the Product Manager, fighting the Designer, sometimes even fighting some micromanaging stakeholder that won't leave you alone.

It's definitely fights I can win, but do I even have the energy anymore? Development work involves more than meets the eye. While there are some folks who understand the technical intricacies, it's tiring having to join discussions you know won't go anywhere.

I wish it was 2000-2010 again, when my biggest problems were Sales promising features we don't have and then having fun with the other devs coding it.