I think it's basically circular. If you try to have pride in your job, your pride gets destroyed by the frustration of it all and you either quit or give up on the pride. So what deserves is pride-less work, which causes the frustration.
The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to locally have pride by feeling like a little team who cared about each other's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it, from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.
Yeah, this is what I’ve also experienced. You can have a great team, and a lot of influence in that team context. Scaling up that common feeling from 5-10 people gets harder. Realizing this, I’m not really interested in working in larger organizations anymore. All the overhead that bogs down speed just sucks the life out of me.
The best teams I've worked on were ones where we managed to locally have pride by feeling like a little team who cared about each other's work and occasional sacrifice (being on-call, etc) and it felt like a little family. As soon as further-away managers start reaching in and "fiddling" with it, from their prideless vantage post where everything is just a system to accomplish quarterly goals, the family-feeling fades away and it goes back to soul-crushing pointlessness.