Personally, I refuse to treat my job as "just a job." I want it to mean something. That's fine for you, and quite a laudable position to take. But the reality

Personally, I refuse to treat my job as "just a job." I want it to mean something. That's fine for you, and quite a laudable position to take. But the reality is, in a great many environments, across the board -- in blue chips as well as in startups (often quite insidiously so) -- as soon as you start personally investing in your work, you start taking on considerable risks. It means, almost by definition, you're going to start butting heads with people -- or at least take on a heavy risk of appearing to others like you're butting heads with them, even though you're not. Because they'll have to start justifying their own decisions, and exposing their own lack of depth and experience. And that's really, really threatening to a lot of people. The safest route, by far? Keep your head down, and don't become "personally invested" in your work. Otherwise you risk becoming (per the Japanese proverb) "the stake that sticks up."