Agreed. In fact, the description of the big company environment "barely any work to be done, it mostly involved sitting at a desk and writing some emails all day" is a stereotype often applied to the day to day life of boring large-company developers.

In cases where this is true, a developer who has spent the past 10 years primarily writing emails and doing minimal coding is unlikely to be a strong developer candidate - the blade is dull from lack of use.

My recommendation to OP is to find ways to demonstrate your motivation and skills in order to counteract the stereotype, perhaps through open source contributions.

LOL, I once spent my first 3 weeks at a job sitting at a desk with no computer yet... started bringing in my personal laptop tethered to my phone (killed my data use after windows update right after the new billing cycle, that was a painful month). I was spending about 20 hours a week in planning meetings though... once I had a computer assigned, I was still blocked by others' tasks another 14-15 hours a week... so all told, I actually got about 4-6 hours of actual productive coding done on a typical week...

I jumped at the first job that even looked interesting to me... I couldn't handle that much mundane.