This is a bad idea. Definitely well intentioned, but has a lot of bad side effects. Especially at big companies, I was instead actively encouraged to dive right

This is a bad idea. Definitely well intentioned, but has a lot of bad side effects. Especially at big companies, I was instead actively encouraged to dive right in, make very small changes to existing production code & submit it for a code review. That gets you started in the right direction asap, because the feedback is direct - its pertinent to your code that you wrote, so you feel it viscerally & begin understanding the code even though 10 minutes back it was an opaque mudball. If you become a waterboy, you will definitely be appreciated by the team, productivity & morale will go up etc - But you personally didn't sign up to be a waterboy! You came to be a player. So play. You can't go from being a standup-summarizer or infra-support-guy to your regular senior developer role. If you are any good at those ancillary roles, you will be playing those roles for a long time. Every day doing infra is a day not doing regular dev - that's just the way it is. I have been there & its not fun. These ancillary roles have a way or morphing into a fulltime job, and soon that's what you'll end up doing. This isn't WMA/CAA where you start in the mailroom and few years later you become Hollywood's top producer greenlighting 100 million $ movies. It simply doesn't work like this in tech companies.