This cost-center point is key. I work for one of the big international electronics corps as an enterprise web dev, but they have no interest in the quality of our work. They don't understand it, they have no belief in codebase maintainability (everything is new development or bugfix, basically as soon as an app is written it becomes frozen legacy code that will sit for 5+ years until a rewrite is finally budgeted).

A lot of the superiors they hire really affect the architectural policies of the company. For example, we can use Spring & jQuery but little else. Now they are trying to write apps with heavier front-end & getting into trouble cuz its a mess of jQuery callbacks with no real js framework. Why? The main architect has never heard of React, Angular, backbone, etc. (not to mention the fact that I'm one of like 2 devs who can actually write js, and unfortunately the other does not possess the equally rare skill: "uses proper design patterns"). You'd think I was joking until you met a bunch of corporate consultant programmers.

Basically, these companies try to boil web development into an old-school "IT" process but the level of intellect is astonishingly low. I've been lookin for a new gig at a tech company for quite a while but it was tough to make a change cuz this is my first gig out of grad school, had to prove myself a bit & build resume.

The only relief is that the corp "cost-center" IT kindof job I have is such a mess that its a good place to study & relax, pace of work is veeeeery slow.