Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same quality in 2 months.
Then they realize they are late actually (one company for example was 6 months late to deliver to clients) and want me to use AI to churn out code even faster.
Meanwhile I find out they lost all people that knew how things actually worked, there is no documentation, or worse, the documentation is outright wrong ( one project I worked had thousands of Jira tickets generated from a requisites document. After some months of politicking I got permission to see the requisites document and learned it was from another project entirely, they wasted years coding with the wrong requisites outright! )
Then as I get close to the end of probation period, the company tried some kind of hail Mary, one company thought maybe I would be more useful if they fired their DevOps and asked me to do the job of the senior engineer that had quit, the fired DevOps, and learn Go (I was hired as C dev, not even CPP) in 2 weeks. Then when the absurd hail mary fails I get fired.
For a while I have been trying again and again with always same results, tried to see what I was doing wrong, and now I concluded I am looking for a job in the wrong places.
Every time I got fired the same criticism happened: I spent too much time going into "rabbit holes" and figuring out details of legacy code or debugging or fixing things or refactoring, and not enough time just shipping code fast enough to appease clients. I keep trying to change this behavior and fail, maybe I should instead find a job where this behavior is something good instead of something bad, but I have no idea where to look.
Also, changing a job is two-side process. they need to like you and you need to like them. If you find that too many developers are going out, too many job offers from their side, that might mean that the company is toxic. Stable good companies, don't have a lot of job offers. They are not so aggressive searching for people ;)
Always ask why they hire, try to find out why people leave.
the rabbit hole thing isnt a bug. Understanding the system before shipping is good engineering. The wrong companies just call it "slow".
Otherwise look towards jobs that require niche, less popular, languages or tend to require additional skills like an engineering, law, or medical background.
The ultimate goal is to find a work culture that values selflessness. Whether that means operations, product quality, or original problems to solve. When you are surrounded by self oriented people you will always get firefighting: that kind of environment where everything is an emergency and everything is tech debt and the primary goal is worship of some tool because all that matters is the tool user (the developers own desires) as opposed to the product users, the actual business target.
Figuring out, details, debugging, etc... yes, these need to happen, but you have to slot those in around delivering things, often without a complete picture.