> Looking back, I realized I had worked on a lot of low-impact projects — tasks that made no impact on users and no impact on the team, like updating outdated libraries. The old library worked fine without any updates. Updating it took weeks of my time but delivered zero value to the team or business. I did it simply because my manager told me to.
It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.
You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.
> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”
At that point:
* if it's not a golden handcuffs situation, might be easier to find another company to prosper in
* if it is, then yeah, you have to play their game if you care about promotions
* or just do good work where you're at, no matter what their myopic incentives say
It's all nice and good until you're stuck with an EOL version of Spring, migrating to something newer is a gargantuan task that's measured in months so ofc nobody does it and as a consequence the project startup is slow and it eats resources, some libraries are incompatible and there are bugs that will not get solved and CVEs just pile up. Whereas if you update things constantly (or at least monthly), the deltas and breakages between any two states of the system and its dependencies will be way easier to manage.
You can prioritize what and who should do what, but I don't think you can categorically describe certain work as below someone, if they're good at it (assuming nothing urgent elsewhere) and it has a positive impact.
> “You’re doing great work,” my manager replied calmly. “But I have to stack-rank the team, and those tasks aren’t staff-level. Because… some lack business value. These tasks aren’t business priorities and had no impact on customers and other teams. Also, at the staff level, you need to work across teams, influence broader decisions, and build visibility beyond just our team.”
At that point: