A bit of career advice that has served me amazingly well over the years: Stick your head up every so often, maybe every six months, and assess where your positi

A bit of career advice that has served me amazingly well over the years: Stick your head up every so often, maybe every six months, and assess where your position is in the company relative to the company's goals. If you're on a sideline project, or if your company is moving away from where you are, or you're in a project that just isn't doing well, take action to start angling away from that. Try to get moved to a good project. Or, if you've got the institutional reputation, see if you can't be the lead or part of a team for a new project in line with the company goals and headed towards obvious revenue bottom lines. Or, worst case, find a new job, but this is not always necessary. It may be a months-long transition, even, but often if you are persistent there's nothing impossible about this, and it doesn't have to be something that you're constantly stressing about. It's just a light touch applied every so often. Once you're in such a position it'll usually be some years before you need to worry about this again. But even so, keep sticking your head up every so often and see what's going on, just to be sure. But do it on purpose. Don't just sit back and take whatever gets assigned to you. This doesn't even have to be stressful necessarily, because while you may encounter local resistance, at the corporate level nobody is ever going to complain that you're trying to align yourself harder with where the company is going. It's not like you're asking to pursue a pet project on the company dime with no prospect of payout... it's the opposite of that in almost every way.