Every job comes with a description of responsibilities, and it becomes easy to think of that as what your job is. This post is a reminder that your job is always, ultimately, one thing: adding value.
By this I don't just mean making money for the company or increasing stock value. I mean adding value to people. Your job description is intended to identify the way you'll do this in your organization, but we focus on that alone, we lose sight of the forest for the trees.
How Experts Lose Track
Consider a software engineer who gets into a rhythm of completing tickets, producing features and fixing bugs. By themselves, those add no value. The value comes from those features actually being useful to humans, who in turn value the product more. No matter how elegant a feature or advanced a research breakthrough, if something is not valued by people, it is not a job anyone will pay for.
This particularly applies to technical people who want to advance by just being amazing individual contributors and avoid working with people. At junior levels that can work, because someone else is doing all the work to determine what you can do that will be valuable to someone. As they move up they'll quickly face ambiguity and be expected to do more defining and prioritization themselves, all based on what will add value to others. I have seen many individual contributors whose performance ceiling is not their technical skills, but their willingness to work with people, which requires communication, documentation, collaboration, compromises, and sensitivity to non-technical needs.
This also applies to the ongoing AI revolution. AI models can implement tickets quite well. What value will the human add? It will be in understanding not just the larger context of the system (still a challenge for the models), but in understanding what about this work adds value to people and the business, and what implementation will be strategic for adding value later.
This makes existing, running-in-production "legacy" code have far more value than people give it credit for. So often we want to throw legacy stuff out, rebuilding or replacing it. (Often we should, carefully over time.) But we must all appreciate that no matter its technical flaws, this legacy thing is providing most of the value to users right now, and it needs to be taken seriously until that is no longer true. In practice that means: expect that system to last quite a while, and learn in exacting detail what it's doing for people before expecting it to go away.
These things are the work of technical leaders, who understand that in the end it's all about adding value.
Ask yourself:
How does my work add value to people?
How can I excel in skills that add value to people?