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So sorry about read that. I know, more or less, in which situation you're, and it's so sad, so painful. But what's not that obvious and it's much worse: It is dangerous. Dangerous for your health, for your carrier and for your persona.
So the best help here would be to never ever forget your strongest card: you're there as much as you want. Don't stop of searching better jobs and stay there as less time as possible. Think on each day of your work as another step to improve your situation. Don't be used to the situation and take the following better (although far from perfect) opportunity when you find it. -
I went to self employeed. Now I can control what projects I really do. I still do consulting, but for my own $$$ and it is my decision to value the $$$ or the coolness of techstack and if I want to work there or not.
This is obviously not everything bright and sunshine. And this is not everyones cup of tea.
I think what I want to say is: There are other companies and other options.
I've got a decent developer job with decent people. It pays well enough. I work from home. There's a lot to be grateful for, and I am grateful. That being said...
I work for a consulting company with Agile in the name. It's the sort where they hire you and tell you that you'll work with an Agile team on exciting stuff and that they want to make sure you're learning and doing what interests you.
The reality is starting yet another engagement which is really just staff augmentation, joining another organization that's made a mess of what they're building. It works, but the code is all over the place. They've got tons of defects and work is slowing.
The idea is always that if we show them what great work we can do they'll let us do more. That sounds like an okay plan for the company but not so much for me.
My motivation is drained. I'm not going to fix your machine. I'm just going to become part of it. Show me what you want me to work on and I'll write the code. Then I'll spend several days trying to get a local environment to work so I can test what I did through the UI because you don't have enough tests. I'll spend more time debugging the environment than anything else. I won't really know if it works and it doesn't matter because without tests the next change someone commits will break it anyway. The next person can't manually test every scenario any more than I can.
While I'm doing this, someone somewhere is building the next application that I'll work on after they're done screwing it up.
If you're about to start building some new application, pretend it's done but it doesn't work very well, it's slow, it's buggy, and every new feature you want takes months. Pretend that you need to hire someone to fix it for you. And then hire them to build it for you in the first place.
I thought I found a place where I could work for 5-10 years. Maybe I have. Maybe when I explain (in the most positive way possible - this isn't how I normally talk) how utterly depressing this is they'll put me on something else.
Once I'm out of this depression I'll go back to trying to make this better for myself and everyone else. We can do better. It doesn't have to suck like this.
rant