The shift from 'building cool stuff' to 'navigating endless layers of abstraction and compliance' is definitely wearing people down. It feels like we spend more time managing the 'noise' around the work (Slack, Jira, AI-generated emails) than actually writing code that solves problems. I've found that working on a small side project with a very constrained, 'old school' tech stack is the only way I can still find the joy in it lately.