When I first joined the company I'm currently working at, I was a bit too focused on elegance, "proper" tooling/structure, and "doing things the right way", etc

When I first joined the company I'm currently working at, I was a bit too focused on elegance, "proper" tooling/structure, and "doing things the right way", etc. For example, I couldn't _believe_ that we used raw SQL in our endpoints instead of using some fancy state-of-the-art ORM. The company is a start-up, and my previous job was as a SWE at Google, so naturally a lot of design decisions felt shocking to me. I definitely spent a lot of energy thinking about how we needed to "change everything". Over time, I learned more about the history of our company + the projects I work on, and why they have come to be this way, which has helped humble me a bit, and in turn make me more effective on the team. However, what has _really_ made a difference w.r.t making me more effective, is a recalibration of my incentives - rather than focusing on personally "creating impact" and "enacting change", I shifted my focus to "what does this company need to be successful, and to go public". This significantly changed my thought process when it came to prioritizing work, and has made me easier to work with. Counterintuitively (to me), that shift has done more to make me a better engineer, than perhaps increasing my technical expertise would have.