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If you feel like you're not doing enough, bring it up to your manager and ask for more. Don't get complacent, you might be told you're doing great, but secretly people think bad of you and it might come back to hunt you later.

Take a good look at your team within the org. Is it a sinking ship? Do people sing its praises or lament it? Would it be considered a success or a mess? You don't want to be on a sinking ship, it's only a matter of time before it attracts higher ups attention and people start to investigate what's wrong, if you're caught in that fire you will be blamed as part of the problem. So either become the ship's captain, or switch team.

Finally, it might be because you are too low down the chain and not seeing the bigger picture. A lot of the hard work at FAANGS isn't coding related. It's about decision making. Choosing what task to do next, what component to rewrite or replace, what business goal to meet, which project to invest in next, etc. Sometimes this takes a while and in the meantime, there's little change to do on existing live systems. What you should do is get engaged with that decision making. Learn who your stakeholders are, get involved in the planning process for your team, understand what business you serve and what their problems are, figure out the goals leadership has set out for your org and your team, etc.

In other words, at FAANGS you don't get work handed to you, you're expected to come up with the work yourself, be your own leader and advance the team and company forward independently with minimum hand holding. Don't wait for people to tell you what to do, figure out what needs to be done, what should be done, influence others to agree and support you, and get it done.



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