[mtlynch]

Context for others: steelframe and I were teammates at Microsoft in the late 2000s.[0]

Hey steelframe! Good to see you here again!

This is good advice and something I wish I'd recognized earlier at Google. For the first few years there, I was under a manager who had 20+ direct reports, so he probably didn't have time to think of the best projects for me.

I probably would have been better off figuring out my own high-impact project rather than focusing on fighting short-term fires that kept popping up for my team.

In certain ways, I solved this with the founder route because I get to skip the "earning the right to create my own destiny" phase, but in other ways, there's inescapable grunge work like legal compliance, taxes, vendor issues, etc.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41011696