Here’s a personal story from back when I was at Meta that should tell you everything you need to know about how things get built and shipped there.

I was working on a service that was a bit of a disaster. Terrible reliability, performance issues, needlessly complex and brittle code, outages all the time. And this was something that everyone using Facebook or IG directly interacts with. My first couple months were spent desperately trying to get it back in order.

Once when I was in the middle of a SEV-1 my manager set up a meeting and said “you have been doing great work on the operational side, but we already have enough to put in that bucket on your PSC. Stop working on this for the rest of the half and ship one of <useless projects> instead, otherwise I won’t be able to save you in the next review.”

I realized then that I had wrongly thought the team was collectively responsible for ensuring a good user experience, when really everyone at the company is individually responsible for ensuring their own success.

Your story is an extremely typical one. It's even worse at older tech companies like Google, Oracle, Amazon, Microsoft, and IBM.

Yet these companies are doing well by any standard. Sure, IBM is bad but it's still a $100B company.

Who is even doing useful projects at these companies? Every story I've heard is everyone is doing useless projects for promotions.

Maybe I just don't know how large companies work.