Once a year, deliberately, take on the piece of work everyone else is quietly stepping around.
The flaky test suite nobody trusts. The deployment process that only one person understands. The service with no owner that everything depends on. The documentation that has been wrong for two years while everyone keeps a private correction in their head.
I am not telling you to be a martyr. I am telling you something about how careers actually move.
The glamorous work is contested. Ten people want the new greenfield service, so your contribution is one tenth of a story and you spend as much energy defending your slice as building it.
The unloved work has no queue. You can own it outright, and ownership is the thing that compounds.
There is a second effect that people underestimate. The work everyone avoids is usually avoided because it is unclear, not because it is hard. And unclear work is where you learn the system. Nobody understands a company's architecture better than the person who untangled its deploy pipeline, because to fix it you had to learn every corner it touches and talk to every team that depends on it.
You will come out of that with a map in your head that took other people five years to build.
Then there is the political effect, and I use that word without any cynicism. Fixing a thing that made everyone's week worse buys you goodwill you cannot buy any other way. People remember who removed the daily annoyance. They will take your call, back your proposal, and mention your name in rooms you are not in.
Some rules, so this stays a strategy and not just extra hours.
Pick something with an end. Ongoing thankless maintenance is a trap; a specific broken thing you can finish is an asset.
Say out loud that you are taking it, so it is a decision and not a drift.
And when it is done, write up what changed and what it saved. Nobody else will narrate it for you.
Once a year is enough. Do it and you will build a reputation that no promotion cycle can ignore.
– Asael Shinder
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