Do not shy away if you get boring projects at work ⚡
It is important to acknowledge that a company or a team will not have exciting projects for every engineer every time. Hence, once in a while, you are bound to get boring and mundane work.
One out of three will be some kind of grunt work 🙃
To be honest, I have never seen grunt work as something negative; instead, I have always seen it as a way to
- instill trust that I can get things done
- use mundane work as a lean time to rejuvenate
- use the extra time at hand to help other teammates
- use that extra time to build cross-team influence by presenting tech talks
It is okay to do one mundane project for every two exciting ones. There is nothing wrong with it. But if the ratio is higher in your case, speak with your manager and raise the concern.
⚡ I have always believed that the most impactful projects are not given to the smartest engineer, but to the one who has a track record of getting things done.
Some of the mundane projects I did
- Managed staging infrastructure - debug and approve requests over Slack
- Configuring security policies across AWS dev and prod infra
- Driving GDPR compliance across the organization
- Auditing SaaS tools to save cost
Business >> Product >> Engineering and I always align myself to whatever the business needs. Because I said yes to these, I got a chance to do some of the most amazing and impactful projects.
⚡ ps: my system design October 2023 cohort is open for admission, only 32 seats remain; enroll to learn system design the right way
arpitbhayani.me/course