Re:Ask HN: How to play the politics game at your company?
by webmaven on Tuesday March 06, 2018 @05:16PM
(#16532592)
> [data cleaning is] boring, it requires a lot of dirty, ungeneralizable work.
How sure are you that it really is ungeneralizable? Just because it appears that way at first glance doesn't mean you won't find opportunities for automation once you understand the domain and the typical dirt in the data better than anyone else (note: 'dirt' can often be modelled).
And well, once you're the developer and maintainer of the data-cleaning system that has become the company's competitive advantage...
Similarly, bug-squashing is often an opportunity to really understand some important but unglamorous system (eg. payments, or authentication), as managers will notice that bugs in system X are fixed much faster and more thoroughly when assigned to jr. developer Y, and this often leads to becoming the go-to person for implementing new features in that system.
How sure are you that it really is ungeneralizable? Just because it appears that way at first glance doesn't mean you won't find opportunities for automation once you understand the domain and the typical dirt in the data better than anyone else (note: 'dirt' can often be modelled).
And well, once you're the developer and maintainer of the data-cleaning system that has become the company's competitive advantage...
Similarly, bug-squashing is often an opportunity to really understand some important but unglamorous system (eg. payments, or authentication), as managers will notice that bugs in system X are fixed much faster and more thoroughly when assigned to jr. developer Y, and this often leads to becoming the go-to person for implementing new features in that system.