Starting Fires on Purpose – When and How Leaders Need to Break the Rules

I enjoyed the first portion of the article until the 1/3 of the screen was taken over by a call to subscribe to their newsletter.

I can certainly relate to feeling the happiest at work when I writing more code and dealing with less deployment/maintenance work.

I also feel the happiest when my manager or his boss has expressed that the project I am working on is important for X reasons. It isn't just the request to make this my top priority but also the increased attention that tends to come with that declaration. It feels nice to know that someone actually cares about a feature I am writing and when they say "Top Priority" they mean it and do their best to deal with all the process related "stuff" , ensure that I get rapid feedback and responses from other groups as fast as possible. It really kills the "flow" to be stuck on a portion of the project that can't go forward until the SQL DBA decides to check there email.

I've expressed in the past that I often feel like a code monkey churning out units of work and I think most of that comes down to a lack of recognition for things I am working on or realizing that what I am working on just isn't that important. I can't tell if I just like the attention of working on "important" projects or if the important projects just happen to be the most fun.

I am a bright shining star and I just want someone to say thank you (mild sarcasm)

I'll be curious to hear opinions from more experienced Software Devs, I came from a production support team where we did quite a bit of "high profile" firefighting and moved into Dev 1-2 years ago. Dev is certainly more... mundane.