I’d like to do other things, but this is the only sort of thing I think I’ve ever gotten an interview for.
> I'm just trying to understand: are you guys really spending your whole days changing button colours?
Not quite like that, but it isn’t uncommon for me to spend time making minor changes because the business area helping with requirements can’t remember what they wanted one day to the next. I wouldn’t like if I said there are many days I spend mostly doing nothing, just waiting for some process or for someone’s calendar to free up before anything can continue. This has been common at all jobs I’ve had except one, where I was a contractor hired to do an extremely specific task for a very small company.
I’ve started working in other things in my (abundant) spare time, hoping they’ll help me get somewhere, but I’ll see.
I've never worked in a large company, never had a salary that is even close to US engineer level, and yet I regularly write code that traverses complex graph structures (often with recursive CTEs in SQL), just because that's how a lot of real-life data is structured. I spent this weekend debugging this traversal, in fact. And that's only the 'trees and graphs' example from the top of my head, as I've found myself constantly using all the different CS stuff throughout my career.
This is not an attempt to attack anyone or an attempt to appear superior. If anything, I'm constantly reminded by how stupid and uneducated I am when I'm reading HN comments. I'm just trying to understand: are you guys really spending your whole days changing button colours?