[jakswa]

I feel this pretty hard, but left the small-turned-big company within the last year.

So I thrashed around in your latter section for a few years. Luckily the old organization gave me space to work on what I choose, if I could come up with impactful things. But turns out those things are usually visible by leadership, not the dev with his head buried in guts of the company.

Jury's still out on the new company but the difference in impact was visible from Day -1 (I was given access to datadog and spotted some random, high-throughput DB path that needed an index).