Absolutely! IMHO, new engineers start with "What technology should we use to do this?", while experienced engineers start with "Assume we've already done this s

Absolutely! IMHO, new engineers start with "What technology should we use to do this?", while experienced engineers start with "Assume we've already done this successfully with some (i.e. any) technology, what will the impact be?" And yes, if you have a hierarchical eng org then there's different job responsibilities at different levels. But at some point, new engineers end up making their own calls, and they usually don't pay enough attention to the forest. Some technically complex things just aren't worth doing, and some simple things are incredibly valuable to do. E.g. Porting the fundamentals of an MMU + append optimizations into a distributed storage system: not theoretically groundbreaking. But the impact for its users was!