That grunt work will never feel meaningful.

E.g. working the website of a forefront AI lab doesn't feel meaningful. More like you're the idiot for having spent your life on web dev, while some are fixing humanity's last problem.

You have to aim high from the get-go.

That the same people you admire will destroy your job.

- I was a Flash developer and Steve Jobs killed Flash with the iPhone. In all fairness, for its security problems.

- So I went to infrastructure and then Bezos released AWS.

- So back to UI development, and Dan Amabrov and a few others made my React project a legacy one.

- Now I'm waiting for Sam to deprecate my frontend dev job with AI.

You need to make sure management knows your value. Don't assume that they will notice it on their own. I worked with a guy that constantly bragged about how smart he was and his daily accomplishments. I though he was a jerk. I now feel that he knew the system way better than me.

That ultimately, the industry wants engineers to manage the business, instead of managing software.

If I had known this I would not have gone through university at all. I would have attempted my own business from the start and learned on my own.

Instead the entire school system seemed to be about learning technical knowledge, from math and physics in high school, to computer science in university. Then you go to interviews and you get technical tests, followed by some technical focus at the beginning of your career... but then after a few years once senior level expectations start to kick in... the expectation shifts and it's about learning how the business works, and how to make profit with software.

It was confusing why this shift happens in software. It might make sense in other industries where younger people need to replace older people (i.e. something with physical labor). So I'm now reevaluating how to look for a company that will leverage all of my existing technical knowledge or I will need to reconsider what to do because my career expectations don't align with the average software company's engineer expectations.

Learned (and still learning): imposter syndrome is a lie, don't hesitate to ask for help, document everything religiously, learning never stops, and burnout is real.