This has to be the case. Professionally, I've always found myself lacking in advanced projects to cut my teeth on, but also too time constrained doing the routine work to be pursuing anything "interesting."

I don't blame the company, of course, but I wonder if it isn't sound in terms of business to amortize some of that risk by considering that risky projects let employees self-train and learn new skills that could be of value.

I wonder sometimes if, in the quest to make things "interesting" again, we fall into the trap of making the uninteresting things so damned complicated that we find that scut work foisted back on us, because the tooling has become to complex.

As I survey the mess of JS and transpilers and server-side technologies that have amassed themselves before me, to do the same thing that a Visual Basic Forms app could do 20 years ago, sometime I weep and gnash my teeth a little bit.