I worked in the industry for 20 years, at all kinds of software companies. If I can
help it, I'll never work at a company again. The single most frustrating thing is the extent to which programmers are forbidden, by process, from being programmers and doing programming. Even after 15 years, and with "senior" in my title,
most of the time (not
all of the time) I was constrained by process to make tiny, incremental changes, adorned by a ton of very low-utility process. My day to day work was seldom different, and often
more tedious, than the work I did in my first year in the industry. Management considered every code change to be
a risk, rather than
my profession, and everybody had to work to the lowest common denominator of capability on the team.
Now I work for myself and actually do programming all day.