Want an unfair advantage in your tech career? Consume content for other roles
I travelled to Yellowstone National Park. I wandered into the back country office and spoke with the ranger. She was super friendly and informative. One interesting fact she shared is that Yellowstone is almost 4,000 sq. miles and receives 5 million visitors a year. 99.9% of those visitors never travel more than 50 feet from the main road. This means that most of those visitors experience less than 1/10th of 1% of the actual park.Why do I bring this up? Because this is how most worker's experience their organization. Stay in your lane, get that promotion, best case you get your boss's job. But how did that job come to be? Who setup the training that you took? Most people can't even describe where the money in their business comes from.It is a tremendous advantage to explore your organization fully. Visit its other offices  and learn what your colleagues do and why they do it. Especially as an engineer. You can literally write your own ticket. Last year I was bored and I started to break down our cloud spend. This took me on a little detour. That detour involved a team that was following a process I could not understand. Turns out they didn't understand it either. I little reorganization yielded a $385,000/yr cost optimization. It took me just a couple days. Chances are you swim in a sea of complacency too.