Doing Interesting Work

Over the past two weeks, I have had the chance to talk with several engineers about life and career. I love hearing what people have on their minds, what they are doing, and what plans they have. And I do not mean that silly “where do you see yourself in five years” question. I mean actionable plans. What are people actually trying to get done in their lives, careers, jobs, whatever?

One theme kept coming up in pretty much every conversation: “How do I get involved in interesting or high-visibility work?” I struggled to answer that question because I do get involved in all kinds of cool projects and important work, but I had never really stopped to think about how that happened.

I tried to give a few useful answers. I talked about the importance of working on anything that annoys you, because it probably annoys other people, too. I talked about looking for small improvements in processes or tools, and then actually improving them. Automate even small things, because the compound effect adds up fast when you multiply that time saved across an entire organization.

Then, during one recent call, my boss said more plainly what I had not really articulated myself. He said, “Eri always assumes everything is crap.” Maybe not those exact words, but that was the idea.

It sounds harsher than I mean it, but there is something useful in that mindset. In every job I have had, at every kind of company, I have found something broken, clumsy, inefficient, or just needlessly painful. And I do not mean hidden, genius-level problems that only I could see. Usually, the people already there knew it was bad too. The difference was not insight. It was willingness. I looked at those things and treated them as problems worth solving, instead of facts of life to accept.

That, I think, is where interesting work often comes from. Not from waiting to be invited into something important, but from noticing friction everyone else has learned to live with and deciding not to live with it yourself. If you build that habit, people start to notice. Over time, you become the person they think of when something messy, unclear, or broken needs fixing. And once that happens, more interesting problems tend to find you.

Of course, the attitude alone is not enough. Anybody can say something is broken. Anybody can complain. The part that creates opportunity is being willing to do the work.

Now, this is not guaranteed to end well every time. I have been lucky in my career. I only had one truly terrible boss, someone who could not handle improvements or even suggestions for improvement. In that case, I just quit and found another job. Same basic attitude, really. I did not accept it as a fact of life.

And yes, I have seen smart engineers get burned for doing exactly this in toxic or political environments. Some managers feel threatened by change. Others will praise the idea, then quietly sideline you. Not every workplace rewards usefulness.

That does not mean you should abandon the mindset. It means you should use it with your eyes open. Start small. Fix something annoying for yourself first. Automate a small recurring pain. Show the before and after. Make the value obvious. If people respond well, keep going. If you sense resistance, pay attention. Sometimes the answer is to keep quietly fixing things. Sometimes the answer is to leave.

Even then, the habit is still useful. You are building proof. You can walk into the next interview and say, “Here is a broken process I fixed, and here is the impact it had.” Sometimes that is exactly what gets you the interesting work in the next place.

Arnold Schwarzenegger puts it well in Be Useful: “There is no substitute for putting in the work.” That is the real distinction. Not just seeing the friction, but deciding to understand it, own it, and improve it. That usually means doing the unglamorous things too: reading old documentation, talking to the people involved, understanding the constraints, and fixing the root cause instead of just mocking the symptom.

So if you want to get involved in interesting work, stop waiting for someone to hand it to you. Look for what is obviously bad, especially the things everyone else has learned to tolerate. Then pick something that matters and start improving it.

Do that often enough, and people will begin to trust you with harder problems. That is usually how visible work starts. Not with status, but with usefulness.