Nobody else is responsible for your growth

Creativity is a muscle. It must be stretched and exercised to grow and stay healthy. This is true not only for personal projects but also professionally. Your employer is often content to let this muscle atrophy as long as your week-to-week productivity remains sufficient. Remember: nobody else is responsible for growing your skills and guiding your career – it's up to you to find interesting next steps.

I've worked with many junior engineers who wait passively for someone to guide their development. I understand the impulse: software is an endlessly complex pursuit, and it's hard to know where to begin. It's challenging to predict which new skills will remain valuable years from now. Many people work in systems that aren't resilient to change, making junior developers wary of introducing unintended side effects.

But life in the real world isn't like school, where authority figures are actually responsible for helping you find your footing and pointing you to the next step.

The primary goal of a company is to extract value from employees. If you find a task you're competent at, your employer may be perfectly happy to make it your life's work, letting you stagnate at that level. They'll allow you to live the same year 10 times, repeating the same skills until they become irrelevant and you become unhirable.

With this reality in mind, you must take responsibility for your own growth and get comfortable pushing into discomfort. Work nights and weekends on a side project if that interests you. If you work in the digital realm, add variety to your life by developing a physical skill like art or woodworking. Join a community choir or take up skiing.

Getting stuck in a rut is easy. It's difficult to predict whether any particular skill you develop will pay off in the future. But every new thing you try builds fresh neural connections that will yield unexpected dividends in future challenges.

So if you're feeling stuck and burnt out professionally, the hard truth is that nobody will guide you out of that situation. The good news? You have the freedom to explore every side quest that interests you.