Is it too early to ask my new manager for more challenging projects?
I don't feel like I've grown as an engineer lately and it feels like I lack cool stories for promotion packages and behavioral interviews. I came to the conclusion that I don't get to work on projects with big enough scope.
The last time I worked on something that made me feel like I was growing was a whole year ago. There was another good but slightly less significant task 5 months ago, but I had to come up with it myself out of boredom (all the other alternative projects/tasks felt weak by all 6 axes of scope from Alex's "Nail your promotion course").
I'm unsure, if in my teams we actually don't get meaningful work, if the issue is with my frame of mind, I just have not been bold enough to volunteer for exciting work. But I'm sure that it's worth bringing up with my manager.
The only reason I hesitate to do it, is that I just got transferred to this team and assigned to my new manager one month ago. I feel like it may be too early for this kind of conversations, as I have not established myself enough. What do you guys think?
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Discussion
(4 comments)- 12 months agoPrimary author of Beyond Cracking the Coding Interview, Ex-Google
I think this is mostly just a framing issue. You could ask for challenging projects on day one, and it wouldn't be too early if you framed it correctly. The most important thing to keep in mind is how you frame it.
Instead of asking for more challenging projects that will help with a promo, consider looking into areas people don't like about the codebase and find meaningful ways to improve it. Does the testing architecture need work? How’s the CI/CD pipeline? Should a part of your app be asynchronous when it currently isn't?
These are the kinds of headaches you can solve for other people. If you come to your manager with a problem you've noticed and a solution to fix it, your manager will appreciate that.
- 02 months agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Series A Startup
Got it! So, I take it as to keep proactively creating my own scope (and then validating it with my manager), rather than complaining on the lack of it. Thank you!
- 02 months agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
it feels like I lack cool stories for promotion packages and behavioral interviews
This is probably not true. You can connect the dots between your work and what you think is interesting or important. This somewhat reminds me of the famous janitor story at NASA:
The President then casually asked the janitor what he did for NASA, and the janitor replied, 'I’m helping put a man on the moon.'
Your work are likely contributing to the key priorities of the company in some way, even if they're one or two hops removed. Can you figure out what those connections are, and then talk to the people who are closer to what you consider "important" work?
Once you talk to them and build a relationship, figure out what contributions can improve their life, e.g. fixing bugs, asking good questions, or tackling something well-defined in scope.
Once a Senior+ engineer wants to work with you on something important, you don't even need to ask your manager. It should be more of an FYI:
I'm working with respected person X on this critical project. Here's the timline and here's why it's important -- lmk if you have feedback!
- 1a month agoMid-Level Software Engineer [OP]Series A Startup
Rahul, you've really dug deep here. Maybe I've had good stories all along, and it's just my mindset that's too pessimistic. That's a very refreshing perspective, thank you!🫡
Your work are likely contributing to the key priorities of the company in some way, even if they're one or two hops removed. Can you figure out what those connections are, and then talk to the people who are closer to what you consider "important" work?
To elaborate on that a bit, I do get to work on important things, but they rarely align with tasks that are challenging from an engineering perspective, and I'm trying to seek out more of those.
Once a Senior+ engineer wants to work with you on something important, you don't even need to ask your manager
In my work environment, this scenario is a bit harder to imagine. We work within a fairly traditional Scrum, with fixed team and work is trickled down to us in a top-down manner from a product manager assigned to each team. We only choose our tasks during sprint planning, where everyone is free to pick up what they prefer. It gives us leeway but has the drawback that even a Senior+ engineer doesn't have any more influence over task distribution than others, making it challenging to secure the most desirable tasks.
In the end, I decided to give it a shot, inspired by the Russian idiom, “You don’t get punched in the nose for asking,” and told my manager that my tasks weren’t challenging enough. He agreed that the recent epic we've been working on could feel a bit dull, shared some more exciting upcoming projects with me that I may get to work on, and mentioned that if I still feel unchallenged, we could consider a team switch for me.
