I was a few years into the career, working for Big Blue on a piece of network monitoring infrastructure. We had been bought in and part of fitting our product

I was a few years into the career, working for Big Blue on a piece of network monitoring infrastructure. We had been bought in and part of fitting our product better to IBM's target markets was to address requirements for the US federal government market. FIPS 140 was part of that, and as a mid-level engineer I had to learn the technical ramifications and implement a bunch of stuff. The standard itself was complex, but not overly so, and it became clear after a while that it was more about disabling features and removing dodgy home-grown algorithm implementations than it was about any massive security upgrades. Pretty sure I listed it on my cv... it was definitely part of building up my "developer who is pretty good with the crypto side of things" trajectory but I'm not sure it was in any way pivotal.