[dadoge]

In your case, are you developing valuable domain expertise?

In infra roles, there is little "business side" of the work and hence could be more easily commoditized.

I work at a big tech company and the staff engineer in our org has been at the company for 4+ yrs and has A LOT of domain expertise in ads, and institutional knowledge about a lot of different systems in the company.

Domain expertise is directly transferrable to some companies, and having a lot of institutional knowledge is also a good selling point IMHO -- e.g. asking good questions in an interview about a companies stack could show that you can very quickly understand some nuances of the types of systems they built/are building since you've done something sorta similar.

I've also seen us hire pretty senior people with a good amount of domain expertise but didn't know ALL the shiny new tools, but did show they were keeping sharp in SOME of them.