Think Big Projects

Alrite, this advice is for all the IT grads out there. You are fresh, and you are eager to show your talents to the world. And you landed yourself quite a decent job in the MIS department. But you found your job function quite the opposite of what you really wanted to do. Your role is....PC support job, endless troubleshooting MS office applications...for computer idiots staff. Or, if you got some programming job, it's debugging some previous bloated hideous ugly code written by an intern last few months. And no documentation.

So what do you do?

Now, this scenario is common when you work at a big company. If you are in a smaller company, you won't be flooded with so many boring stuff...

I know, cause I was there before. My other colleagues were just doing uncool stuff, like programming ABAP programs for SAP. Or managing some computer hardware stuff. It's just boring, for me.

Now, even when you are stuck with day to day mindless jobs, try to fit in your mind, BIG projects. Now, where can you get such inspiration to start one? Just look at your company's business, and see if there's any problems, that you could solve by putting some IT work into it.

And why would you want to trouble yourself, and take more jobs on your shoulder? Actually the benefits of doing this, has more to do with you.

First of all, the next time you want to job hop, you will have to update your resume. And which one is better? Writing big stuff? or writing the smaller mundane stuff? The big stuff will make you a better marketable person.

Then, if your boss, sees that you are pro active in thinking about problems, harder than anyone else, you stand a chance for better raise, or compensation. But nevertheless, this should not be your main target. Money in fact is not the main target.

So what is?

So that you could do the cool stuff. Even if you are working for a company. If you could pull the resources for your cool project, it would be much more fun.

For programmers, we want to be cracking harder problems, using the latest, or whatever tools we have to pull it off. Hack into whatever necessary to do things. These are the cool stuff.

For a record, I did in fact manage to pull out 2, 3 major projects in my career so far. It's big enough, that I could just go to my next employer, and confidently get the job.

So, if you are stuck in the rut with boring stuff, it's time to think big, and solve the next big problem.