I work for a very large corporation (Fortune 100 that everyone has heard of). I was hired by a business unit back in the days before the company even had an IT department (back then everything technical was outsourced to another company). So for decades we did whatever we wanted. Eventually the company created an IT department and about 10 years later they got wind of us and insisted we get moved into IT. Complete hell. Our productivity took an insane nosedive. As you said, it is slow as molasses to get anything done and everything requires so many (SO MANY!) meetings. At first this was very stressful, but eventually I just gave up. Whereas before I could get in a good 30 hours of productive work done a week (meetings are rarely productive), now I am lucky to get 5 hours of productive work done. Instead I spend the majority of my time in meetings or waiting for people to get back to me. 2 things help. First I work on personal projects in all the downtime. Second I started as an online instructor at a university teaching web development to students. So I spend time helping the students. And the company is perfectly happy with my work, since nobody else can get anything done either. It’s insane, but I learned to just let it go. If the company doesn’t care about how much productivity they are losing, why should I care?
> And the company is perfectly happy with my work, since nobody else can get anything done either.
I just switched job from a big company to a fast-growing startup which doubled their engineer team size in one year. I was unhappy with my productivity in the new company, thinking I was not doing enough, but my managers said they were quite happy with my performance. I think I was comparing my productivity with the peak productivity in my previous role where I already spent years working on the system. But what the managers really measured is your relative performance compared to your other peers. So as long as you are doing okay relative to your peers, albeit all being unproductive, you would be okay.
At a fruit-themed Bay Area company I can register a domain name behind a load balancer, issue a new cert, kickoff a VM to host it internally all in the same day without any approvals... so long as it is below a certain scale suitable for testing, skunkworks projects, etc. Approvals and meetings only become necessary if I want to deploy a production service, a large-scale service, or both.
Requests for a new repo or Confluence space are fulfilled same day and give me complete admin control over it. I can kickoff custom OS builds and generation of installation images via a self-service portal. I can create new email-enabled LDAP groups via self-service. I decide if the group itself is self-add or not, etc. Anyone else in the company can do the same. Many other things are as simple as direct manager approval.
You don't have to put up with bureaucratic nonsense, it just happens to be common in corporate America where management doesn't trust the peons to make decisions. Or perhaps where everything is driven by division P&L so no one wants to be responsible for spending money outside their fiefdom?
I prefer an environment where individuals have responsibility and yet where we accept mistakes will be made. As long as you learn from a mistake and don't continuously repeat it there is no need for a new process in response to it.