well, maybe that explains why I've gravitated hard away from general-purpose backend work :)

I've had a great time on teams where folks can go off and build great tools/libraries/etc that others can use and adapt, without needing a whole team around them—ideally there's lots of collaboration, but it doesn't have to be formally structured

I guess the main difference is that you don't have to operate a tool or a library; if somebody has issues with it, they can patch the code themselves or simply adapt around it in their own code

I also enjoyed working on simulation and optimization problems for similar reasons; there's lots of direct business value, but there's enough slack around it that if I go somebody else can take a model over and maintain it without any issues

unfortunately lots of organizations do not know how to make library-style code "count" the same way a service or stateful component "counts"