[frankincense]

I'm in a similar situation and it's really frustrating. As an individual contributor, the more senior and skilled that I become, the less of a chance I have to actually use my expertise and skills to lead projects or deliver features that make an impact and create value. I'm constantly steered towards absolute time-wasting activities. Recently my company has become convinced Kafka is going to solve all our problems, and executives have OKR's related to the number of queues teams implement and it's impossible to launch anything now without a queue. My boss is making me join this cross-team initiative to gratuitously add queues to services that receive a dozen requests per minute at PEAK throughput. Also, there's no functional benefit to adding queues to these services, if anything it only makes them more difficult to administer.

Sorry, I just needed to vent.