Define "the wrong things." I see a year or two of productive work before I'd have to reach for anything with genuine doubts about business value. I might not read my stakeholders' minds exactly, or hit their preferred ordering, but I know they'd be consistently happy with the changes.
Ownership and vision are kind of the point of midlevel and senior roles. If you'd fall off the track in a matter of weeks, something is seriously wrong.
Do you think that’s representative of most work in most businesses, that you could work for months and years and finish things sort of in whatever order you want? Most of my experience has been that the planning and priorities of the business are much more strict and immediate, and you need constant interaction between them and the technical people to deliver the right things in the right order, and hopefully at approximately the right time. Business goals come frome outside the technical teams, they’re seldon determined by the devs, no matter how senior.
I think that’s more or less what it means to work in a tech company, as opposed to an IT department. “The business” is not some external thing. Each org is responsible for some part of the business, and contains all the specialties needed to take care of it. Junior people may work only within their specialties, but senior people are expected to have close partnerships and shared understanding with their cross-functional counterparts. We talk with each other frequently, but few of those exchanges contain anything new or surprising. Usually just an agreement to do the obvious next steps relative to what we did last time.
Ownership and vision are kind of the point of midlevel and senior roles. If you'd fall off the track in a matter of weeks, something is seriously wrong.