After 25 years of career, I still have to see an organization where things are so perfect that:

  • no refactoring is needed
  • no additional documentation is useful, it’s all there shiny and beautiful. And it updates itself nightly.
  • logging/monitoring/diagnostic tools are perfect
  • builds are so fast that you wonder if you did press enter
  • all necessary linters are configured and used
  • everything has unit tests
  • and integration tests
  • and there’s enough time for exploring alternative technologies for future development
  • and enough time for contributing feature/fixes upstream for the open source things you use
  • and you cannot build tools to answer asks from customers even faster So yes, you may not get official tickets assigned to you, but it doesn’t mean there’s nothing else to be done. Perceiving that need is the first step for moving from junior to more senior role, acting on that need is the second step.

Now, depending on the country you’re in, social norms may make you unpopular among co-workers and managers alike if you move too much, so there’s that.

Beautiful lessons by /u/mavvam