I am facing sort of a similar problem. I recently joined a $BIGTECH company. I work in the business development / product management area in technical capacity. Think of my role as a technical advisor, solutions architect or mini CTO to help my company's partners to build products together. Lately I have observed that a lot of folks I deal with at my $BIGTECH company as well as partner companies don't really do any real work. They attend meetings and sometimes they have update which basically is 'i am working on it'. The inflated titled executives (VP of strategy, Sr. director for finance industry etc) from partner companies just update a couple of words on 2 year old slide decks all day long and don't have tangible deliverable for months to show for. They don't have any valuable feedback on other's work. The partner companies I deal with are with 10k+ employees and these folks are supposed to be senior leaders thinking about 3, 5, 10 years vision. It's very demotivating to see people around me are either mediocre or not working at all. My work depends on they doing their job well and its stressful for me to deal with this. I feel like wasting my work-life just pretending.

I quit my previous job at another $BIGTECH company due to similar problem where people didn't want to work.

Is this a new thing since pandemic that people don't want to do real work? Or it was always like that.

I was a consultant for the last 15 years before becoming a full time bigtech employee a few years ago. I didn't have visibility into inner workings of tech companies.

I think I should do something of my own. But don't know what it should be.