> The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit. One person's KTLO is another p

> The Dirty Work Theory: The lamentable work that many people avoid are great places to look for high impact, low hanging fruit. One person's KTLO is another person's promo project. It's fascinating how much a project can be glorified in one-company and is dismissed at another. I had the (not necessarily thaaatt) strange path of working at Amazon to going to work at Siri/Apple. When I was at Amazon, "client" work was not sexy; rather sharding a database is what all the magic-makers did. So, as a newly hired Java/Backend engineer at Siri, my first project, which I pitched for, was sharding our database for operational efficiency. Yay! Win! But, after about a year of that work, my manager (who's happy with my work) says ".. to get you promoted, let's get you on some more customer impactful work, where we can get you to demo some user facing features...". So, I dive head-first into the challenge on learning Swift/iOS stack and accelerate our team's services to run on-device; winner-winner-promotion-dinner! Nobody at Siri wanted to touch the old server code. All the glory of WWDC+features+new_device_handouts were going to the folks working on client. The senior engineers who'd been around for decades across the industry were working on the client. They'd still fix server bugs nobody else could handle though. At Amazon, all the rockstar sr engineers had worked on services/distributed-systems for decades. But yeah, senior engineers (rockstars or otherwise) don't stick around at Amazon. They tend to leave after 2 years; weird. That 18th month at Apple was the biggest learning so far in my career: someone's view of a KTLO project is another person's view of doing god's glorious work.