Comment by googamooga

I'm currently a technical architect (individual contributor role, IC) at a large multinational financial firm in Switzerland. Previously CTO/CIO/Founder/CEO in multiple companies in multiple industries (enterprises and startups), most of them in Russia. My overall experience in tech (IT/Telecom/SW Eng) is more than 35 years.

Before I joined my current company, I have never been an IC and never stayed for more than four years with the same employer. I'm five and a half years already with my current employer and would really appreciate to continue with them further despite obviously like the OP says "my knowledge is not really valued and useful" there.

The thing is, using my accumulated versatile tech experience and good understanding of how any large enterprise works, and working in IC position, I can really bent my workload/agenda in a way that work becomes more or less fun! Not counting the Teams meetings, an unavoidable evil. :) But even them, I turn them into fun activity too, by generating nice useful minutes using transcripts "anchored" either in code or in Confluence pages (with a tool-enabled LLM). Being an individual contributor is important for this, otherwise if you even a level higher, in example, a line manager, you can't really bent your agenda much because you must care for other people and invest your time in helping them to achieve common goals.

That were my 50c. :)