What you get and what you want

In the software industry one keeps getting into a situation where he has to do things that he doesn’t want to be doing. This is especially true for fresh graduates. The best thing here is to get out of the situation as smoothly as it is possible. It is bad for the company and more importantly it is bad for you. The best interest for both the individual and the organization is to keep working on aligning their mutual goals.
One of the companies I know has had this “random” resource allocation strategy for fresh graduate hires. “You will have no choice of projects/work. Be prepared to do what you get to do” said the campus presentation. This makes sense from a pure administration point of view. All fresh recruits are above the “bar” set for the employees, they have negligible expertise, most of them have little clue of what they want to do in life and above all they were plenty in number. But in the long term this turns out to be bad. Misallocates will leave or live with the job.
There are several factors that can leads to such situations and every professional most likely faces it every once in a while. How an organization, manager or the HR deals with it is another thing but here are some tips for the victim to keep in mind while dealing around this situation.

• Know what you want to do. Otherwise you will never know what you should be doing in the first place. Think yourself a handful years down the line. And see how you can work towards getting there.
  

• Learn to say “No”. If you have the option then just say it! It is good to deny doing something upfront rather than doing it just for the sake of it or even worse giving it up at a later stage.
  

• Look for the opportunities you still have. See how the job still has something that will help your cause. When I had switched to a completely different profile, I was surprised at how two radically different job roles can have so many skill sets in common. This will especially be true for fresh graduates since they are still acquiring the skills needed to work in the industry
  

• Work on what you want in parallel. Save time while you do your day job and spend that time (I say push yourself for more) reading and experimenting things that you really enjoy doing. Of course saving time doesn’t mean doing it miserably. Remember what you are paid for is the day job and of course who wants to have pointers to bad work after getting famous :) Often this becomes a blessing in disguise. Learning to do things efficiently and learning to do things in parallel (read prioritizing) are one of the most precious work skills and they take a lot of time and effort to master
  

• A more common situation is that your job has a mix of tasks some of which you like and others you don’t. Always make sure you have those secret spare cycles to pounce on what you want to do and at the same time have those pseudo busy cycles to avoid getting into what you don’t want to do

While we are at this remember that the most important thing is to enjoy whatever you do and deliver the best for your worth. And of course there is the James Barrie quote: “Happiness is not in doing what one likes but in liking what one does”

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