[shepherdjerred]

A lot of my time as an entry level engineer at a FAANG was doing "extra" work.

It included:

* Migrating our applications from Java 8 -> Java 11.

* Identifying that our fleet was way over provisioned and then downscaling leading to a huge reduction in infra cost.

* Refactor our infrastructure-as-code package to be more maintainable.

Most of those things were useful but not prioritized. I found them interesting or worthwhile, so I took the initiative and drove them to completion. Most of these tasks were on the timescale of months on the side from my assigned work. I didn't overwork myself to do this -- I very rarely worked more than 8 hours a day.

[silicon2401]

So you did your regular work and in your extra time during normal work hours, you also thought of and executed on these ideas? Did you ever seek approval or just go for it? By the time I proposed ideas like this in a PR or something, I imagine my manager would question why I'm spending so much time on this kind of thing

[shepherdjerred]

Exactly! I worked on things that had value for my team and was interesting to me.

I bounced ideas around with coworkers, but I never asked for approval. As long as you’re doing your assigned work I don’t think your manager should care. This will depend on your company/manager of course; I was lucky to have ~3 managers during my tenure who were hands off