nix666

exactly, no one is forcing landlords to own units they can't fill

if you have a vacant unit that you're having trouble filling and you don't want to be taxed, the free market is telling you to lower the price. it's not complicated.

It's not just you. What you're talking about—an unclear or uncompelling mission and a lack of agency—is a big source of dissatisfaction in our industry. It leads to burnout and turnover. As far as I'm concerned, it's specifically a manager's job to address these problems. As much as anything else, manager is tasked with organizing the work of a team so that teammates all feel like their work has purpose and that they have agency over what they do.

There are a two big reasons for this. In some companies, a lack of profitability, or a desire for short term speed above all else, means that managers aren't given the space and resources to do their job well. A good manager will not stay in places like this for long. Even in companies where managers have resources and room to succeed, I think that companies very rarely train managers to do their job well. Often management is a promotion from IC to person in charge of making sure ICs ship products on time. But how to do this is not taught at any point in an IC's career. The trade offs involved in shipping products on time are counterintuitive: the things that work best over a 1 month time scale will kill your productivity over a year time scale.

If you feel like you have the raw materials to be good at what you do (you have the skills, you're interested, you have the time and can be dedicated) but you feel like your job isn't fulfilling, my advice is to start thinking about who you want to work under (or what kind of person) and include that as a top criteria in your future career moves.

I work at a major tech company and, yes, ultimately my team's goal is to increase company (and shareholder) profits. But my goal as a manager is to translate my teams directives into work that actually adds value to our customers, improves the work of our stakeholders, and uses the skills of my team in new and interesting ways. Yes, some work we have to do isn't the most fun, but everyone understands why and we're all bought into minimizing the work that sucks so we can get to the parts that are exciting.