No career options, even if you wanted to become a team lead, you would need to 1) wait several years for a free spot in the team lead mentoring program to open 2) go through team lead mentorship 3) wait for a new team lead position to open in the company. This means you can wait many years to maybe get promotion. And for pay raise, there is a political thing called “10% rule” so which means at most 10% of people will n company could get a pay grade increase, even if it is very deserving. Many teams have people with same job title and responsibilities, and one of them is higher pay grade. Often the higher paid person is just used chat gpt / MS copilot to do all their works. Really silly to see this, and with all confidence doing it. It really is politics here, need to play the game I guess.