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> Early on in my engineering career, there are a handful of times I was assigned to a project where I was set up to fail. I didn't understand the situation unti

> Early on in my engineering career, there are a handful of times I was assigned to a project where I was set up to fail. I didn't understand the situation until far too late. There are a few tell-tale symptoms: I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do; I didn't really know how to do it; and I didn't understand how the assigned work actually solved a higher-level problem. No one else did, either (these situations usually represent a failure of management.) Yes! I have been in such a situation once (I didn't quite understand what I was supposed to do and no one else did, either) and, to this day, I remember it as a cautionary tale when I think of moving to a new position. The people who think that they can shine in this situation by being proactive underestimate the lack of understanding: it is not a blurry task, it is a task where you are told to do X and no one knows what X actually means. You can do great things, but they will not be able to deliver on the requirements.

XorNot 3y ago
Reminds me of when I was hired as an SRE, then told you can't log on to any of the customer systems until you've committed code to the main infrastructure codebase and you're "trusted". This was the only thing the other members of the SRE team actually did though - the job itself was basically "figure out why things go weird sometimes in the customer systems and then fix underlying automation issues". But there was an actual developer team as well, including all the original founders - who knew the system perfectly. So things would get posted and you'd be like "oh, that's a good starter task..." and instead a "core" developer would pick it, do the one line fix, and then just push it straight to the master branch (or PR it but it would get approved within minutes in their timezone) while I was still trying to get my bearings in the code and tests. Within a month or two the manager who hired me had "resigned", and then I was let go near the end of my probationary period. The whole time I never had any solid work assigned beyond "oh figure out where you can be useful".

XorNot 3y ago

Reminds me of when I was hired as an SRE, then told you can't log on to any of the customer systems until you've committed code to the main infrastructure codebase and you're "trusted". This was the only thing the other members of the SRE team actually did though - the job itself was basically "figure out why things go weird sometimes in the customer systems and then fix underlying automation issues". But there was an actual developer team as well, including all the original founders - who knew the system perfectly. So things would get posted and you'd be like "oh, that's a good starter task..." and instead a "core" developer would pick it, do the one line fix, and then just push it straight to the master branch (or PR it but it would get approved within minutes in their timezone) while I was still trying to get my bearings in the code and tests. Within a month or two the manager who hired me had "resigned", and then I was let go near the end of my probationary period. The whole time I never had any solid work assigned beyond "oh figure out where you can be useful".