"and career wise -- should be working on the biggest project" That explains a lot. I have seen a lot of SWE that believe they are working on bigger project but

"and career wise -- should be working on the biggest project" That explains a lot. I have seen a lot of SWE that believe they are working on bigger project but they are not. Probably 90% of them. These are the guys that will produce a lot of useless abstractions without producing any real value. I guess they aspire to work with kafka/k8s at Google but ended up at the local shop. And nothing wrong with the local shop. This is probably the place where you actually have the possibility to produce real value.