> you're likely in the wrong project or too involved in phases of a project where your contribution can't move the needle significantly anymore
to expand on this, I've found most of my happiness as a generalist in early stage startups. to me, a larger company looking for a generalist with no concrete role is a sign that they don't have their stuff together. obviously there are exceptions to this rule - some companies just prefer generalists - but usually once teams get big enough, people settle into specific roles, even as a generalist.
> larger company looking for a generalist with no concrete role is a sign that they don't have their stuff together.
Or that their culture is such that they have entrenched, stovepiped personnel that don't venture out of their specific knowledge domains and they need somebody to bridge that gap.
An analogy that I've used far too often when describing software deployment in traditional orgs is one of the dev team and IT playing tennis with the grenade that is the software. With each volley back and forth they give each other nigh-useless information - the operations team will tell the dev team that it crashed without sending logs and that it's because of random setting X that they pulled out of a hat, then the dev team will tell the ops team that said configuration value is hardcoded but that can't be the problem because it runs perfectly on their dev machine, and so on and so forth. Having somebody to mediate this interaction so that it's actually productive is inherently invaluable to, y'know, getting actual work done.
Unfortunately it's not particularly valuable from a business perspective because if your org is operating this way then it means that they place greater value on the performance of "software engineering" than the actual value added by the software produced. So basically what you said.
to expand on this, I've found most of my happiness as a generalist in early stage startups. to me, a larger company looking for a generalist with no concrete role is a sign that they don't have their stuff together. obviously there are exceptions to this rule - some companies just prefer generalists - but usually once teams get big enough, people settle into specific roles, even as a generalist.