Why would you want to work outside of a company's core competence? Ideally, your core competency (programming) and a company's core business (software developm

Why would you want to work outside of a company's core competence? Ideally, your core competency (programming) and a company's core business (software development) are identical or at least heavily aligned. This arrangement allows you to grow your competency since business core competencies can be very, very advanced. Want to go deeper into code optimization and high performance? There is probably a critical piece of software in dire need of optimization. Want to draw diagrams? Some legacy systems need integration and solution architect's touch. On the other hand, working at a company where your role is unaligned with the core competency, you usually hit the ceiling on the complexity of what's required from you pretty fast. Sure, there are a thousand different excel files in dire need of wrangling, but you are really hitting diminishing returns on your skill building after the hundredth one.