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This resonates with me, and I recently read (yet another) Cal Newport book that helped me codify the feeling into words. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” makes

by dan-g 4y ago

This resonates with me, and I recently read (yet another) Cal Newport book that helped me codify the feeling into words. “So Good They Can’t Ignore You” makes a lot of good points, but IMO chief among them is building up career capital that you can use to leverage to work on things you’d rather be doing. In this example, you earned so much capital with the boring project that you were able to spend some to work on something you wanted to—obviously higher-ups don’t want to lose a good worker.

DoughnutHole 4y ago
The important thing to note is that this is not a passive route to the good stuff - there's no guarantee that being a good soldier will get you rewarded with interesting work. There's probably as many examples of excelling at the more mundane work getting people pigeonholed into the role of the reliable maintenance guy who couldn't possibly be moved off of a project because it would fumble without them. And then you have the companies with work cultures that like to boast about doing "interesting" work - in companies like Google you get nowhere doing important, mundane maintenance work. You'll only get promoted for making the new shiny thing even if you're reinventing the wheel - it's the reason any new Google product that's not a main driver of the business gets shelved after a couple of years.
- uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
  Yeah, seriously I'd put a big warning on that one. I've been burned many times (and know many people who have) being the nice one who does the hard boring work that no one wants to deal with, only for the company to then make you do more and more of it. It's a good way to make yourself hard to replace, but they're probably gonna want you to keep doing the thing you're hard to replace at.
  - dan-g 4y ago
    Yeah, this is addressed in the book as well. Thinking about your career in terms of capital is really just a useful simplification, but obviously doesn’t capture all the nuance and politics that one has to navigate in a larger corporate environment. There needs to be self-advocacy, a little luck, and the willingness to walk away (just like in any negotiation)
andsoitis 4y ago
What you want to work on should still align with the business' goals, otherwise you're just indulgent. So the art is in recognizing and steering towards that overlap.

by dan-g 4y ago

DoughnutHole 4y ago

The important thing to note is that this is not a passive route to the good stuff - there's no guarantee that being a good soldier will get you rewarded with interesting work. There's probably as many examples of excelling at the more mundane work getting people pigeonholed into the role of the reliable maintenance guy who couldn't possibly be moved off of a project because it would fumble without them. And then you have the companies with work cultures that like to boast about doing "interesting" work - in companies like Google you get nowhere doing important, mundane maintenance work. You'll only get promoted for making the new shiny thing even if you're reinventing the wheel - it's the reason any new Google product that's not a main driver of the business gets shelved after a couple of years.

uVacCXNiiJCTnYB 4y ago
Yeah, seriously I'd put a big warning on that one. I've been burned many times (and know many people who have) being the nice one who does the hard boring work that no one wants to deal with, only for the company to then make you do more and more of it. It's a good way to make yourself hard to replace, but they're probably gonna want you to keep doing the thing you're hard to replace at.
- dan-g 4y ago
  Yeah, this is addressed in the book as well. Thinking about your career in terms of capital is really just a useful simplification, but obviously doesn’t capture all the nuance and politics that one has to navigate in a larger corporate environment. There needs to be self-advocacy, a little luck, and the willingness to walk away (just like in any negotiation)

andsoitis 4y ago

What you want to work on should still align with the business' goals, otherwise you're just indulgent. So the art is in recognizing and steering towards that overlap.