[yotamoron]

An engineer's value has a direct, exponential relation to the size and complexity of the problems they can solve.

Wanna work on the most interesting things? With the most interesting people? wanna make sure you're compensated accordingly?

make sure you are involved in analysing and solving the hardest problems, in the hardest of conditions.

Sometimes the term 'hard' can be deceiving. When thinking about hard technological tasks, many engineers think about scale, or cracking product/market fit or whatever - all true.

But consolidating a legacy permission systems into a single system in a 30+ years old big corporate is very hard, and bringing a windows, asp.net based legacy (20 years old) to the cloud and integrating all the modern tools is very hard - both are not sexy and might not involve scale and amazing start-up-like mentality. They are both very interesting, very hard to achieve, and are very well compensated.

[fartcannon]

There's a chance this kind of person won't be promoted, or get to do fun things simply because they're so competent at doing hard things.

I think it's better to look like you're the type of person who can do that, but also look marketable and make friends with powerful people in the company.

[giantg2]

Yep, I've spent a lot of my career working on systems and taking stories that others don't want. I'm 9 years in at the same company, have a masters, and I'm just a midlevel dev making under $100k.

[yotamoron]

I agree.