My Biggest Regret as a Programmer

If you sidestep the problems entirely, sure, but I think that's the minority of cases where a genuinely hard social/political problem exists, a technical approach attempted, and the outcomes measured. We can all readily recall Uber as an example in the positive direction. What we are worse at is seeing or recalling the hundreds of times humans struggled with a technical solution that hacked away at the visible leaves while the root remained unaddressed.

Such role will not be simply handed down, though the opportunities will. Collect worthiness points. Dress for the job you want, not the one you have. Some possible general opportunities I see (not everything applies in every company):

1. Assess whatever is important to your direct management and be reliable. The idea is to have more or less consistent performance. 1.1. e.g. Say they think feature A takes 100 hours, feature B takes 50. You know they both take 75. Do A first -> spend 25h on B -> release A -> finish B. 2. Make others happy. This is important to reduce resistance for growth. 2.1. If you have options to make solution elegant and easy for others to use/integrate with, take the latter. Code has to be maintainable, but if you are the sole maintainer, others will judge public API, not the internals. 2.2. Be helpful. Do not help with every struggle everyone faces, you have your own tasks (and to maintain worthiness points), but if you personally can do this task in an hour while it would take the one assigned much more take the responsibility. Maybe their solution is suboptimal or they lack knowledge/expertise. 2.3. Make yourself authoritative source. Do not give advice/answer where someone else could give better one, but rather direct the question to someone who could actually answer that. Unless it is an opinionated matter, e.g. git vs hg. 3. Increase you scope. 3.1. If you see a better solution or problems down the road - communicate those. Might be an oversight or might be judged unimportant by management. Show that you can assess the situation and that you care. 3.2. If you see an opportunity to work on broader issues - take it. This might mean jumping to a smaller project, but taking [small] managerial and architect-like responsibilities. 4. As a new hire you have a unique possibility to grow really quick: instead of doing what you were hired to, you can attempt to prove being able to take "higher" role. Most probably this would mean taking more responsibilities for the same pay. 5. Collect trophies. 5.1. Finish projects. Then you can say "I've done that" instead of "Worked in a company doing that". 5.2. Jump ships if the company/product is going to fail, but assess. Even if Tesla would have failed, engineers working there would still be valuable for creating awesome product. There is a difference between product failing because of being flawed/suboptimal/unsuitable for the purpose and failing because of poor marketing, sales or other market reasons. Git quite possibly would have failed as a commercial product.

  I shall be telling this with a sigh
  Somewhere ages and ages hence:
  Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
  I took the one less traveled by,
  And that has made all the difference.

He is imagining this despite the first three stanzas being about how similar the two roads are, how equally traveled, and how he regrets that he'll only be able to take one. He knows he's making the choice at random, and knows that in the future he will remember otherwise.

Stoicism, eastern philosophy (esp. ZhuangZi), travel and experience of other cultures, all help a lot.