One mistake I’ve seen junior software engineers repeat again and again is their lack of understanding of why they work on tasks they work on. This confusion can be somewhat justified by the relatively small scope junior engineers typically have but it’s a slippery slope. Doing something only “because my manager (or a senior engineer) asked me to do it” has a few drawbacks:
- Inability to execute independently: making even the smallest decision without involving your manager or the tech lead will be hard if you don’t understand the bigger picture. You will get stuck if you can’t get hold of them. It will also be difficult for you to demonstrate you know how to solve problems at your level and are ready for bigger challenges.
- Communication gap: your manager or senior engineer may unintentionally give you incomplete or incorrect information. If you don’t have enough context, you may not notice this. You may struggle to complete the task, but once you finally do, it may turn out that what you built is not what they hoped for and needs redone.
- Hindered innovation: unawareness of where your work fits limits your ability to propose solutions beyond what you’re asked to do. Sometimes, the approach you’re instructed to follow may not be the best solution to the problem, but exploring alternatives is impossible if you don’t understand the broader context.
- Incorrect prioritization: working on a task without knowing its purpose may lead to neglecting this task and unknowingly delaying work that depends on it.
How to understand the bigger picture?
The easiest way to understand where your work fits is to ask your manager or the tech lead. They are responsible for what the team needs to deliver, so they should be able to explain this instantly.
Your question may even come to them as a surprise. They probably assume everyone on the team already understands the purpose of their work. In my experience, this is not always the case. The bigger and more complex the project, the harder it is to connect the dots.
You can start small, but it is important to go deep. Start asking about your task. You may hear that it contributes to a project the team is working on. An answer like this is not very helpful but could be a great starting point. It allows you to drive the discussion further and ask more interesting questions like:
- Why are we working on this project? Why is it important?
- What metrics is this work expected to move, and how?
- How does it support the company’s goals and priorities?
- What projects did we decide not to pursue to fund this work (a.k.a. opportunity cost)?
A different way to understand where your work fits might be by talking to your product manager or people from the UX (User Experience) or marketing team. Because of their different perspective, they can teach you things you would never learn from fellow engineers. The challenge with this approach is that you need to be able to explain your role in the project to them.
Code, the Universe and Everything... 
Hello. What you wrote is logical, reasonable, easy to understand. In my experience, wanting to know the ‘bigger picture’ – ‘the purpose of my work’ – ‘the scenario’ – has had the opposite effect of what you rightly wrote. This sometimes happens when your manager fears (and is convinced) that a serious, capable and enterprising person, rather than working for the good of the company, is a person who wants to take his place. This happens when the manager is a mean person. Often these people become managers with the complicity of people like them or of ‘friends’ or relatives at the top. So I believe that in addition to wanting to know the ‘technical scenario’ and the company strategies, we should examine (with discretion) what is the human scenario. In a particular experience of mine, every good result I had was seen by my manager as ‘a point taken away from him’ in the competition for his seat. Every time the company director praised my results, my boss felt like a ‘beaten dog’, already destined to be demoted in the organization chart and have me as a superior. But it was all imagination and these are things that I understood only later, when after my resignation my laboratory was dismembered, my colleagues and subordinates were assigned to other activities and my boss resigned immediately after. This ‘exposition’ of my experience does not take anything away from the correct meaning of what you wrote, but only adds to ‘keep your eyes open’ and try to understand beyond the purpose of your work, the real purpose of those who assign it to us.
IT:
Ciao. Quello che hai scritto è logico, ragionevole, facile da comprendere. Nella mia esperienza il voler conoscere il ‘quadro più ampio’ – ‘lo scopo del mio lavoro’ – ‘lo scenario’ – ha avuto l’effetto opposto di quello che tu giustamente hai scritto. Questo a volte capita quando il proprio manager teme (ed è convinto) che una persona seria, capace e intraprendente, anziché lavorare per il bene della compagnia, sia una persona che vuole prendere il suo posto. Questo capita quando il manager è una persona meschina. Spesso queste persone diventano manager con la complicità di persone come loro o di ‘amici’ o parenti ai vertici. Quindi io credo che oltre a voler conoscere lo ‘scenario tecnico’ e le strategie aziendali, vada esaminato (con discrezione) quello che è lo scenario umano. In una mia particolare esperienza, ogni buon risultato che io ho avuto è stato visto dal mio manager come ‘un punto sottrattogli’ nella competizione per la sua poltrona. Ogni volta che il Direttore dell’azienda ha lodato i miei risultati, il mio boss si è sentito come un ‘cane bastonato’, già destinato a retrocedere nell’organigramma ed avere me come superiore. Ma era tutta immaginazione e sono cose che ho capito soltanto dopo, quando dopo le mie dimissioni il mio laboratorio è stato smembrato, i miei colleghi e sottoposto sono stati destinati ad altre attività ed il mio boss si è dimesso subito dopo. Questa mia ‘esposizione’ della mia esperienza non toglie nulla al corretto significato di quello che tu hai scritto, ma aggiunge soltanto di ‘tenere gli occhi aperti’ e di cercare di capire oltre allo scopo del proprio lavoro, lo scopo reale di chi ce lo assegna.
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I am sorry to hear about your experience. It looks like your manager misunderstood his role. In most places where I worked, managers’ main responsibility was to enable their team to do great work. Competing with individual contributors is not the way to achieve this.
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Thank you for your reply.
Fortunately, this experience of mine was ‘atypical’ and unique: for this reason it took me by surprise and I understood too late that in companies where they hire relatives, friends, friends of friends, a ‘stranger’ (like me) can be seen as a ‘threat’ in the organizational structure. The danger is even greater if this ‘stranger’ (hired only to obey and not to give an impulse to the company’s development, an adjustment to the ‘quality’ standards) obtains good or excellent results. This can ‘overshadow’ people who occupy important positions, but who do not have sufficient skills. It is not necessary to challenge them, or put them under scrutiny, it is enough to do what should have been done a long time ago and here they feel ‘under attack’. But as I repeat, this is a specific experience and can be generalized only in a few companies (often concentrated in the same area).
Best regards
Umberto
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