I think other comments already touched well on the fact that engineering is a lot more than solving new and interesting problems. Sometimes it is solving the same problem over again with a menial twist, just in case. Sometimes it is reviewing and double checking and triple checking a template solution to make sure that it will be ok. Sometimes it is verifying anothers work. Sometimes it is cleaning up a mess thst another person created.
An engineer also doesnt necessarily have to do anything to be useful. Sometimes you sit idle and just study and learn until your input is needed.
What you are touching on though is that you are stuck in the VC bubble of SV. Your job feels useless likely because it is. Startup incubators like YCombinator are not building companies so much as churning out a carefully controlled product and generate hype about it until eventually they can find a sucker willing to buy it and make everybody disgusting wealthy, well the people that really matter in this game anyway, certainly not the employees. The company isnt selling the product, they are the product.
If you look at the details of some of these company buyouts you will find that they are generally based on headcount. The more butts in open floor plan scrum rooms, the bigger the offer. So they dont really require you ro do anything but actually look busy, even where there isnt much to do. Scrum and open floor plan offices are popular in this culture because they encourage inneficiency and promote a culture of looking busy without accomplishing much at all. They look sexy and impressive. It is all marketing and this myth of the hero brogrammer encourages it.
Now my final thought, why is coding a balanced red-black tree on a whiteboard a more valuable skill to have here than say your score in Candy Crush? Well because it fits two criteria, First being that it is somewhat related to being a typical software developer in an obscure way, and secondly that it is hard enough that if you didnt prepare and solve it before on a whiteboard that you would likely fail. This generates an exclusivity because the fact is that if your job is in fact very simple then almost anybody with less than a year of training could do it, but we cant let that be known because we have to perpetuate the myth that only the smartest most technologically advanced engineers work at our company.
If you are feeling disillusioned then thst is because deep down inside you know that there is something very wrong with the whole system, but what i can tell you is that if you leave the bubble and startup culture then you can find great companies in the rest of America that need smart engineers like yourself to solve real problems.
Now you have to decide, Red pill or Blue pill?
