What kind of SDE are you these days?

I'm lacking accurate words here so please do not behead me in public.

By 'Improver' I mean that you are currently dealing with small scale, or functional improvements that may or may not have drastic effect on the system as whole. DSA / LC grinders or embedded fellas could really shine here.

By 'Builder' I mean that you are mainly involved in building stuff. You don't care much about low level sorting, memory swapping, or things at functional level. You primarily focus on building things and making them work. Once system is stable enough, you MAY polish the slower parts, remove dependencies or redundancies. System Design, Full Stack or Generalists can shine here.

I'm asking cause I'm in currently in a builder phase. I work in embedded and in my 2+ YOE I've shipped nearly a half a dozen of CLI and microcontroller applications.

Half of them are slow, but all of them are super stable (thanks to third-party libs) and sustains the business requirement quite well. As much as I have an itch of perfecting each and everyone of my creation, my manager / client don't allow me to do so.

"If it works. Don't touch."

Now when I look back, I am amazed as well as kind of sad that my LC grinding in my graduate years is getting rusty. The most dirty work I've done so far is bits manipulation, encodings and multi-threading.

Never have I got a chance or a even a scope to use Quick Sort, Graphs, bla bla. I just remember adjacency matrix in theory now. Never got to use it.

Disclaimer 1 : FYI I do know how to center a div and reverse a linked list 🤣

Disclaimer 2 : I am in no way claiming one type of dev is better than the other. I am aware that to develop a sound software, a team needs a healthy mix of both types.

So my question is, is your job is also too abstracted and you feel a little ashamed standing on shoulder of giants before you?

Now that I think of it, this really looks like a rehashed version of Imposter Syndrome. I'll walk myself out.