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Comment by MarkLowenstein | Hacker News Reader

When something becomes routine for a developer, where they can predictably finish a work item without designing anything new, that task is immediately flagged in managers' minds as one that should be done by a more-junior/contractor/3rd-party/off-the-shelf solution. Almost by definition, then, good developers are relegated to only doing tasks that they are doing for the first time. The implications of this natural law are evident in the quality of the output, the predictability of the schedule, and career burn-out of people who are asked to be creative 100% of the time.

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I still spend a lot of my time manipulating lists. Although it may be fair to say that experience helps you realize that you can turn some problems into manipulating lists. Easier to write tests for, and for the next person to understand.

The problem, from the manager's standpoint, is that the really good solutions are simpler than the really bad solutions. That may not sound like a problem, but the concise, correct answer is often self-evident in retrospect, diminishing the gravity of the situation.

Lots of people make suggestions you instantly agree with, but you would not have come up with all of those suggestions on your own. A bad boss won't understand that, until you make another self-evident decision that you would get more money and respect working somewhere else. Maybe not even then.

I think doing things for the first time is still something you can get better at. Although you're working on brand new problems all the time, you can still improve at skills like digesting the problem, splitting it into subproblems, designing systems, faster implementations and testing.

I wish this was true. I'm always finding myself moving around in an organization and projects trying to find new challenges rather than building another standard API. Certainly every project has it's critical pieces where any extra attention can pay off but not so many.

I think a trick you can learn here is that once you're good at doing something that is difficult to do the first time, and becomes tedious to do on repetition -- but is still something that needs to be done frequently, the way to vastly increase your value is to be able to teach others how to do that thing.

What type of company do you work for? It may be different in software/services vs. commerce companies.

I actually work at a software/services company for commerce. Don't get me wrong, this is a big space and there are many challenges but they often tend to be more vertical than technical. Lately I've been making a monolithic app behave less so with decoupled async notifications. Also spend some time prototyping things for future adoption for if/when that's feasible. I'd like to be using something functional like F# but for some reason not being in adtech/fintech drastically lowers tech appetite of companies.

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