From fungible to linchpin

Unbeaten career advice: If you write software for a living and you want to move from “fungible resource” to linchpin, start understanding the big problem you’re a small part of solving, and take ownership of whatever part of the solution you can. The industry is full of people capable of taking Jira tickets and eventually turning them into some kind of functional software. Even (especially?) in this year of AI transformation, the scarcest resource is a competent contributor who cares about the problem behind the problem they’re solving and is willing to proactively own part of it.