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I joined a new company recently. My manager gives me work, but only for about three days worth per week. I have asked him multiple times in the past for more work but this is all I get.

The tasks given would also be very specific like create a stored procedure when he hands me the query. I want to learn the system and I asked him for documentation and he told me nothing exists.

This is a BI application and I'm lost how to learn it and find some places where I can add value. I spoke to a few colleagues who weren't very helpful. I want to perform well and grow in the organisation. I was told by a colleague to find work to learn to motivate myself. ( etc. etc. )

I hardly know the system, and all the BI managers are very good in SQL programming, and it looks like I will soon be out of the job if I continue to spend time at work doing nothing.

How do I find some problem and work on a solution to it?

Neo
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user2577477
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  • Are you the only developer? i.e. no tech lead? no project manager? –  Jun 30 '17 at 18:42
  • There are two developers and project lead and a manager. I report to the project lead. Both lead and manager are technically very sound. Other developers have been here for couple of years and they get more work assigned than me. – user2577477 Jun 30 '17 at 18:43
  • You could consider spending the spare time to learn stuff related to (or possibly useful for) your job. BTW, don't comment your own question, but do edit it for improvement. You could also discuss with other developers to understand more the software project and the existing code base. – Basile Starynkevitch Jun 30 '17 at 18:43

2 Answers2

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Tell them what you're going to do

In an email to your Lead and/or Manager, tell them that you've completed your current assignment and, unless they have something else, you will be working on "X".

What is "X"?

"X" will be:

  1. Implementing a best practice in your BI system (all systems have areas of improvement - you will have to find areas to improve and identifty the solution).

    • or -

  2. Refactoring code that you have found (all code can be improved). By learning the purpose of the code (SPs, functions, views, etc) you will also improve your domain knowledge.

    • or -

  3. Helping another developer - ask them if they need assistance with anything and offer to help.

All of the above show that you are self-starter, wanting to improve the organization and grow in the domain knowledge of the organization.

By telling your lead/boss what you plan on working on, that may trigger them to say "no, work on this instead."

You can then say "OK, I'll work on that. After I am done with that, should I return to "X", or did you have something else you want done?"

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I had this problem when I first started, too, just so you know you're not alone. Here are some of my suggestions, I recommend doing all of them until your time fills up, not just one or two:

Keep pestering your boss. As soon as you're done with work, ask for more, but don't just say, "hey, I need more work to do," rephrase it, so it helps prompt him to answer (ie -- "do you have any problems I could help solve?"). Ping him at least once or twice a day.

Talk to/shadow your coworkers. Watch what they do, ask questions about things, offer to be their sounding board (aka "rubber duck"), etc. Ask them the same kinds of questions as your boss -- "can I help you solve any problems?"

Research stuff. If your BI system is an off the shelf thing (not internally built), look for any kind of documentation or tutorials to get yourself familiar with the base system. If that fails, research more about things related to your general job duties -- optimizing stored procedures or SQL queries, etc.

Poke around. If you have any kind of access to the system, explore it. As long as you don't make any changes, you shouldn't hurt anything (and if you do hurt something from just exploring and reading, then you've uncovered a weakness in the system that you can then approach others about fixing). If you can create or have access to a sandbox environment, copy whatever scripts and stuff you find into that sandbox and play with it.

Learn from any avenue available to you. You're new on the job, so you're very likely going through an onboarding period. This means that your workload is going to be light in order to account for the learning curves. Leverage that and learn anything and everything you can. The more you learn, the more value you can bring to the company in the long term.

Shauna
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