10 years later and I'm now a senior developer, but I feel like my career is evolving backwards. I am now working on a tiny sliver of a huge system. I know nothing about the user or their business domain because they are so far away from my work. I'm clueless about how my work fits into the business needs because those decisions are made by someone I've never met high up a command chain. I don't get to find problems and creatively solve them. I don't get to see the moving parts of user needs, business needs, frontend needs and backend needs, nor do I get to engineer solutions for all those needs to effectively fit together. I hate my job.
How do I make myself attractive for employers with smaller projects? I've heard the suggestion that I should look for startup jobs, but my early projects were all in big companies and I still got to do smaller self-contained projects.
Is the problem .NET? If I switched career track to .Node.js, would I attract the kind of projects I love?
"Enterprisey" organizations like trendy languages and platforms too, usually adopting them in particularly clumsy and painful ways, while mature organizations can do a good job with .Net and Javascript or any other "stack"; don't assume correlation.