| > the grunts who get assigned more menial pieces of work Funnily enough if you automate and re-architect those menial pieces of work, you will turn that pile of boredom into a "serious growth prospect". > Does anyone have similar or contrasting experiences? The grass is sometimes, not always, greener where you water it. I've been in that position, most of the boring stuff for me are related to internal operations. "High profile pieces of work" usually equate to "greenfield" customer facing UI or features, while it's always great to work on new stuff, there's also serious growth into improving something that currently works. Personal experience on preferential treatment? it worked for me where if you try your best that every boring thing you touch turns into gold, you can make a new 'market'. Example: slowly refactor some boring internal backend services, take 30 mins to sketch a few wireframes and show it around of what it could be to fellow users/officemates. It gets enough eyeballs that it turns into something exciting that other engineers would want to work on too. Management decides if it's worth the time or not, the key to win their approval is if the refactor/re-architecture/development is small enough to solve a very painful process point (ex: accounting needs data from different databases, solving a very buggy scenario from a current product currently solved by shoehorning manual data entries in some backend, etc.). If you don't get approval, it's okay, you've refactored something crucial and your other officemates have definitely seen your worth. Just keep repeating it. |
The problem is time, unfortunately - especially when developing products, the timelines are quite restricting: tickets are estimated by the team, large deviations usually need to be explained. So if there's something I can do in a sensible amount of time, I'd go for it. Plus all the overhead of helping others, reviewing/merging PRs etc.etc.
One of my main approaches to try and prove myself was to help out with identifying/fixing company-wide issues in some of our platforms. Got me some good contacts (and a very senior engineer offering to mentor me for a bit) and I certainly learned a lot doing it.