Career Hack: Put Pressure on Your Boss to Come Up with More Work For You

One of the best career hacks -- especially for a junior dev -- is to knock out your work so quickly and so well that you put pressure on your boss to come up with more work for you. Your boss starts giving you work that they themself need to do soon, which is really the exact kind of work that's going to move your career forward.

One of the best career hacks – especially for a junior dev – is to knock out your work so quickly and so well that you put pressure on your boss to come up with more work for you. It causes your projects to grow in scale, complexity, and responsibility.

When you’re moving super quickly, your boss can’t spend all their time communicating hyper-detailed specs to you, so they have to gradually pull back and offload more of the “scoping out” work to you. You get more responsibility to carry out the project with less scaffolding/supervision, and you build your boss’s trust in your ability to execute.

And as you keep executing and forcing your boss to come up with more stuff for you to work on, your boss eventually gets to the point of thinking “I don’t have time to scope out more work for them because I need to get X, Y, and Z done… huh, you know, things X and Y are kind of advanced but I bet they could do thing Z for me with a little bit of coaching.”

Basically, you put so much pressure on your boss to come up with work for you to do, that your boss starts giving you work that they themself need to do soon, which is really the exact kind of work that’s going to move your career forward.

Note: The assumption in this career hack is that your boss/organization is well suited for rapid career growth. If that assumption is false, then the very first career hack is getting yourself into a position where the assumption becomes true.