Not having opportunities and not seeing them is not the same

You know, for some time I have been thinking about the idea of a mistake when people think they don’t have opportunities. With Software development jobs I see that too often: “I just do the same work”, “There is no growth for me, so I quit”, and so on.

I realised that there is big difference between not having opportunities and not seeing them. And seems usually it’s second one.

When I am starting to reflect on my career and how I got into place I’m at now, one of crucial things were me trying many things. It is hard to tell how something will contribute to your future, but in retrospective it always makes sense.

When I see people complaining about their job, their career, but they kept doing the same stuff - I’m like “but what do you expect?”.

One of example I hear from software engineers that the work is boring because some frontend developer makes the same website over and over. Or another backend engineer makes “yet-anothe-json-to-database-converter”.

I always wonder this because during my career I always had ways to try new stuff, like always. And work on new things. Sure, I have to do some boring stuff from time to time, but I mean we’re software developers, we can make computers do boring stuff for us. Why not to use that?

At some point in my career I made a first launch of AI-drive photo editor when it was not such a crazy hype. And then we had to moniteze it. For a few weeks all I did was tweaking and making new paywalls. At some point I got sick of it and instead I built a system that allowed designers and products to make paywall changes without a developer. So I was able to get back to more interesting stuff for me while company can test selling ideas.

I had lots of examples like this and I cannot understand how somebody cannot find opportunities to do something different.

You could say I’m lucky to have such opportunities, but the truth is - the opportunities are all around you, you probably just ignore them. If you don’t see your’s it does not mean they don’t exist.

For sure there are places where you extracted all possible challenges from a place you are in now, so you need to move forward. But usually it takes years to drain such pool.

Anyway, keep an eye on stuff around you and be opened to try new things. You never know how it will help you in future.

Cheers, Roman