[StilesCrisis]

That seems surprisingly common to me. Visionary engineer has solution to problem, gets hired, solves the broad strokes in the first year, then spends N more years in meetings with exec stakeholders and worrying about schedules/hiring/financials instead of _doing the vision work_.

[swiftcoder]

yeah, and its kind of just misaligned incentives. Visionary engineer wants to solve hard tech problems, corporation wants a product with mass-market appeal. To hit mass-market appeal, corporation cost-cuts until the hard tech problems are outside the solution space...