I've been at my company for a couple of years, this has been my first real dev job.

The team has been growing skills as the same pace as I did, the development department was still pretty new when I joined. The company is in good shape and is very flexible, but as tech is pretty new to them, the project management is at least mediocre. I find myself in an awkward position where I'm one of the most experienced in the team, but not experienced and hired up enough to avoid our projects to take the wrong paths. We've been pushing for more and more sophistication in our workflows (testing, CI/CD/, project organization), but are facing the reality that at the end of the day no one cares how the product is being shipped or developed if it works, so "why something that took 1 month to dev 2 years ago now takes at least the double of time". It's tiring.

I've been starting to look for new opportunities, but I'm worried it's everywhere the same story and at least I have the recognition and flexibility where I am. The pay is bad though.

I want to grow my skills working with experienced people, but I'm not clear where to find that (besides FAANG?). How do you find a company where the tech department is mature and work-life balance reasonable?

Is the grass greener elsewhere?