The years I’ve been working brought a lot of context, more scars, and more pattern recognition. You start seeing inefficiencies, problems. Like a lineman sees a frayed cable: obvious, dangerous, and actually … fixable.
The reflex is to speak up, to suggest a better pipeline, a safer rollout, a saner incident process, whatever. But at some point you notice a hard truth: most of that unsolicited wisdom doesn’t land anywhere. Most of the time not because it’s wrong, but it’s inconvenient (for the moment), politically/socially awkward, or misaligned with the current incentives.
Your brain spins cycles modeling deployment strategies and failure modes that nobody asked you to think about. You dream of a better system, you always did. But the total processing time of your brain is finite.
These exact suggestions could even be packaged, sold, or delivered in a context that actually rewards them in any meaningful way instead of “yapping” into the void. The difference between “annoying senior sysadmin” and “good consultant” is often just whether you’re in a room that opted in.
So the survival skill isn’t knowing what should be improved; it’s knowing when to shut up. Not out of apathy, but out of resource management, for self-preservation.
If no one asked and no one is on the hook to change anything: Stop talking.