ltmenezes

The problems no one wants to tackle

One of the most commonly given pieces of career advice is to work on things that you're passionate about, this is generally good blanket advice when choosing an area of expertise or for which company to work, however, it can easily backfire if you use it for everyday decisions. The issue with this advice is that humans tend to flock to the most interesting and exciting areas, making it harder to find opportunities in those areas and creating new opportunities elsewhere.

Consider the following scenario: imagine that you are the new employee in a crew of fishermen, naturally the most exciting area to work in would be to fish, however you will quickly find a lot of competition in this space, since most people that end up as fishermen are interested in fishing. Wouldn't it be smarter to learn how to fish but also look for opportunities to be the best boat driver, the best person at finding the best places to fish, the crew's best fish cleaner? This would naturally be the path of least resistance if your goal is to be as productive and important to the crew as you can be, which in turn would give you leverage with the crew to explore your original inclination of fishing. These areas that I just described all have something in common, they are all: highly important to the enterprise and either not naturally interesting or risky enough to discourage people from working on it. Finding such areas in any human enterprise is like finding a gold mine, it's a shortcut to high impact for anyone who is up to the task.

Throughout my career I've been lucky enough to find such opportunities in companies that I've worked at. The first time this happened was very early in my career, there was a system that was in charge of performing a daily database operation, it was fairly boring and to make matters worse if anything went wrong with this system the whole company wouldn't be able to correctly operate for that specific day. The result was fairly predictable, no one wanted to touch it, in fact it was the only system in the entire company that didn't have a team that owned it, people came up with an excuse that it was a 'shared system' between different teams therefore we didn't need anyone to own it officially, of course that was an excuse for people to stay away from actually working on this system. One day this service broke and the entire company was unable to operate correctly, I saw this chance and grabbed it immediately, I did a quick fix to get it back on track and then spent the following week working on making this service the best it could be. It was a daunting project, we had a resource-constrained database in production and I had to go through the entire execution plan of its queries (actually read it and understand it) to find out what was wrong with it, but in the end I was successful, I got the system back on track and as a reward a new team was built around me to manage this service and further advance it.

The reason that I tell this story in detail is to prove how an uninteresting and risky system proved to be one of the biggest opportunities I ever had, it easily accelerated my career by at least 2-3 years, I got more responsibility, agency and was made a tech lead for that team. Looking backwards it sounds unfathomable to me that I was the only engineer in the company that wanted to work on this project.

My advice is to work on problems that no one wants to tackle, to break away from the norm and from your own bias when looking for opportunities.