You very likely vastly underestimate your actual expertise. I find that no matter how far I've come, I always feel that I have yet to develop any "meaningful ex

You very likely vastly underestimate your actual expertise. I find that no matter how far I've come, I always feel that I have yet to develop any "meaningful expertise" and its easy to find someone much better than I am to compare poorly against. What you may be feeling, is that more and more bigcos are becoming not-so-big-cos and discovering that years of what you've been doing and piles of worthless development projects are just as useless to them as you already know they are. The era when companies waste money reinventing (square) wheels is rapidly drawing to a close. My suggestion is to find an open source project that uses a technology that interests you(1) and commit yourself to really diving in. You'll probably see some good code, and then realize that you've got something to add. You'll feel like a million bucks the first time code you submit is accepted on the main branch, not because it was your job, but because people liked it. (1) Pick something you are actually interested in. Don't fool yourself by choosing something that you think you should be interested in. You need the passion to keep at it.