[james_s_tayler]

This is the direction that my career is taking. Definitely the benefit is you eventually get to work on the good projects that you want to because people trust you to deliver a level of work they don't seem to get very often.

I've always felt relatively underpaid compared to what I wind up bringing to the table, but I would say there have been subtle but noticable perks in other ways and it's definitely translated to comp over time too.

It clicked for me a while back that the vast majority of devs just working on line of business applications have never and will never put together an entire enterprise grade system end to end by themselves in their career. So all you really have to do is (a) have a relatively good head on your shoulders and (b) just hack away at building out a fully fledged system end to end in your own time. A sort of reference architecture of your own. Then when you need to implement stuff at work, you've already solved the problem once before so instead of taking a day to wrap your head around how a particular part of it works, you just whizz through it relatively quickly. It looks like magic from the outside, but it's nothing more than being prepared ahead of time.