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Can you become a great engineer if you are stuck on a middling team

1 points by strikelaserclaw ↗ HN
can someone become a great engineer when there isn't impactful work to do? i can't decide if a great engineer finds impactful work ("digs it out") even in a barren landscape or great engineers fall into impactful work which they leverage to find more things that generate value. What is HN consensus on this? The context of this is, i work at a great company, with a highly skilled team but the work my team works on is of very limited impact; i've seen people join later than me who seem to have made much more impact because they landed on the right projects. I question if they have an unnatural capacity to seek out value or if it is hard to seek out value in a barren landscape.

2 comments

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0xCAP
I think both. It's not just about creating value, but also finding the energy to go that extra mile and make sure you're pushing your technical boundaries every time you get a chance to. Of course projects and things play a huge role in your professional growth too, I can only imagine how much I'd grow spending X years at a FAANG company compared to a nameless consultancy shop.
abudabi123
The ideal is to be over the horizon and receive an infinite pipeline of new project work that pushes your envelope, your team's error bars or the state of the art. You don't see that on jobad sites where a skill is sql or xml or articulate.