No company can give you the most exciting, challenging, and impactful project around the year, so the ups and downs in the kind of work you’d get are expected.
On average, you would get 4 months of high-impact work, 4 months of moderate work, and 4 months of mundane work in a year. Instead of feeling bad about it, leverage the time and energy to advance your career and secure more impactful projects in the future.
Remember, the most important and impactful project is not given to the smartest engineer, but it is given to the one holding the track record of getting things done well and on time. The trust you instill by doing grunt work or maintenance would and should put you in a position to get the most impactful project.
Given that the maintenance work does not eat up a lot of your mental bandwidth, use this breathing room to identify more significant problems within your organization. Spend time digging deeper into systemic issues, find a solution, create a project plan, and present it to the leadership. This showcases your initiative and capacity for impactful contributions.
When I was given some mundane work, I used the additional time to figure out the root cause of recurring outages and proposed an architecture change to solve it once and for all. Because I was thorough with my homework, it became a no-brainer for leadership to approve.
You can also use this time to enhance your visibility and influence within your organization. The easiest of all is to use this time to hold tech talks and mentor early engineers. These interactions will make it more likely that you’ll be top of mind when exciting projects are conceived.
To be honest, this is what I did at all of my stints across all the companies I have worked at. I gave talks on some of the lessons learned from past projects, new industry trends, or introductions to new technologies. This helped me establish a good reputation within the org.
Remember, every phase cannot be exciting, but it is important to know how to leverage it well. Impactful projects will not be served to you on a silver platter, you need to earn it.
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