Very valuable perspective. I feel many engineers looking to grow fall victim to waiting for others to guide them towards the right problems. The key is really to look at the pain points and engineer solutions with some level of agency, demonstrating that you can.
> One caveat: my experience comes mainly from working on infrastructure and developer tools at large companies, on teams where engineers have a lot of bottom-up autonomy to influence their roadmaps. In a more top-down environment, there may simply be less room to work this way.
This is a big caveat. I too, regularly find a fix problems that need to be solved. Very occasionally, something big blows up, and I already have a solution in progress. Those are curious, because it reinforces that I’m working on the right things, but also that I was too slow. Other times I fix things that never became a major issue. Is it because I fixed it in time? Or was it never going to be an issue?
Anyways, I’m a staff engineer, so I guess I’ve been able to demonstrate my usefulness well enough, but it’s a constant struggle. The new product features and support for new partners is what gets all the glory. At the end of the day I suppose that it is right for the glory to go to them. It’s important for the business to gain new business and market advantages. I really enjoy ‘greasing the squeaky wheel’ and generally making things run as smooth as possible. Depending on your leadership, this might not be the type of ‘staff engineer’ they are looking for.