So most developer experiences are of dealing with an unending stream of unnecessary dumb puzzles, rather than challenging problems with real meaning.
That's exactly what I meant by self-inflicted: thank you for stating it clearly!
I don't mind working on genuinely hard problems, even if we can't get anywhere. It's dealing with lots of unnecessary silliness or trying to get one more month out of the shitty legacy code that drives me nuts.
I was just talking with a friend that is really frustrated because in his view his team is not only trying to deal with a bunch of tech debt, they are trying to move so fast that they net create more tech debt every week. And he feels like he's the only one who will look at this squarely; everybody else just finds their little puzzles to work on. I expect eventually he'll quit and go somewhere modestly less pathological.
The root issue is not that the problems are self-inflicted. The shit-rolls-downhill ethos means that they are to the company, but not really to an individual worker. So most developer experiences are of dealing with an unending stream of unnecessary dumb puzzles, rather than challenging problems with real meaning.
This is not how it has to be. I've been on projects where the code got incrementally better each day. Where we spent most of our time on things that mattered to us and to the business, instead of sweeping up after the elephant parade.