I don't know what your definition of team player is, but at (almost) any real job, there is shitwork. You know exactly what I mean -- maybe someone has to eval

I don't know what your definition of team player is, but at (almost) any real job, there is shitwork. You know exactly what I mean -- maybe someone has to evaluate a new classifier, and that means spending a pair of 10 hour days looking at several thousand documents and hand labeling. Or maybe you're switching version control and someone has to go through 5k branches/release branches/tags and figure out what is needed and what isn't. Or maybe the raid array in the box that hosts artifactory shit itself and someone has to get artifactory back up, recover as many artifacts as possible, and for those that can't be recovered, find their tag in your git repo, check out, and rebuild where possible. Or maybe your company decided to swap DFSs and your project touches HDFSUtils in 873 places (just to pick a random number =P), and some sucker is going to have to go through each and every place you use that module and audit it for possible breakage during the dfs swap. Or maybe you need to upgrade from the original hadoop job api to a cascading equivalent, and you have to do this to some 80-odd production jobs; it's tedious work that has to be very carefully performed so the original semantics are preserved. Etc etc. These are all things that I or coworkers have done. The point is, in any job, there is work that nobody wants to do but that someone has to do. ie shitwork. However, you seem like you don't want to do this. For example, sometimes your boss drops a last minute job in a language or api that you don't know or have never used or maybe actively don't want to use in your lap. Sometimes the work is already late when you get it, or it wasn't scoped or specced appropriately. It happens. Refusing to do it would reasonably get you fired, and make your coworkers hate you, because your coworkers are all doing their ration of shit shoveling. Of course, it's perfectly fair to complain if you always end up shoveling. Or if that's all the job offers, get a new one. But refusing to do it or refusing to pull your fair share is not going to get you far. You need to decide what happens the next time you are asked to do something like this. Because the one thing I can promise about a programming career is it will happen.