Today, I'm going to give you some of the best career advice I've ever received. And it's good career advice for anyone at any level in their careers. And it's especially useful for software engineers and engineering managers because a lot of the time we end up working in a system. In a system of program management, in some kind of cadence, a sprint cadence, we get things handed to us, we work on them, we deliver them, and we rinse and repeat. And this approach to work is consistent. It's predictable. It allows us to continue working in a way that's familiar to us. And we might have a perfectly fine career. We might be able to kind of get by doing exactly this. I'm going to give you a piece of advice. If you are looking to stand out, to grow, to get a promotion, to improve yourself. Your earning power. This is not clickbaity. This is true advice. The truth is there is low-hanging fruit right in front of you. There are gaps right in front of you. I want to talk about these two things specifically. Low-hanging fruit and gaps. It might feel tempting to believe that low-hanging fruit is limited. But we call it low-hanging fruit because it is essentially the same as any of the other fruits. In other words, if it's an apple tree and the apple is lower, that low apple provides the same benefit as one that's 20 feet up. So this idea that you could get some benefit without much effort. I want to temper this a little bit because I don't mean that you're not putting in. You're not putting in sufficient effort to grow in your career. What I mean is relative to the other effort. So the benefit that you get from doing this low-hanging fruit work, the kind of return on investment is very high. And it turns out that low-hanging fruit tends to be in gaps. And here's the really critical part. Low-hanging fruit is contextual. It's contextual to the person doing the work. All right. So think about this. All right. Low-hanging fruit tends to be in a gap. And it's contextual to the person doing the work. What this means is that what is easy for you to reach, what is easy for you to see and accomplish and do something about might be different from the next person. From the next engineer. From the next manager. It's something that you uniquely are positioned to do well. It's something. It's something that you're familiar with. Maybe it's a domain that you're familiar with. Maybe there is some kind of particular technology that you've worked with before that your company needs to adopt. Maybe there's some kind of dots that need to be connected and you see those dots. You have some unique insight, unique perspective, unique experience that makes you particularly suited to solve. That problem. All right. This is low-hanging fruit. Low-hanging fruit doesn't mean easy. It means that you are uniquely suited. You're uniquely positioned to take that low-hanging fruit. And it just so happens that a lot of this low-hanging fruit, a lot of these opportunities that are right in front of you are in gaps. And that's what makes them valuable. All right. So. You know, I don't want to beat the fruit analogy to death here, but. Low-hanging fruit. These opportunities that are in front of you, the ones that are going to be most valuable are the ones that are in a gap for your organization. A gap is usually just represented by some kind of critical problem. This tends to be a relatively unexplored area of the business. Something that hasn't been addressed very well. Right. Right. Some area that not many people are focused on. Some area that you can see the problems, but nobody really knows how to solve them. And the problem doesn't have to be very big. It could be something relatively small. Maybe you see a potential improvement in deployment time. Maybe you see a potential improvement in creating clarity in a backlog. That could be as simple as these opportunities are. Right. And maybe you have done a lot of work with breaking down complex implementations into simpler cards. Maybe you could help create some kind of training around that. Right. This is stuff that, you know, it's not going to be in your job description. It's not going to be something that you necessarily know you need to go and do. Maybe your manager doesn't even tell you to go and do this thing. This is something that you drive. You have an opportunity. You have an opportunity to define, to bridge the gap. Now, contrast this with something that's not in the gap. Right. These are low-hanging fruit things that are not in the gap. Things that most other engineers could probably pick up or most other engineering managers could probably pick up. Right. So this is not the same kind of low-hanging fruit. These are engineering tasks that are valuable but are not necessarily unexplored. Right. This is not a gap. Right. This is something that is kind of on the table next to everything else. Things that don't necessarily provide a unique step change in value. These are not things that you're going to gain, you know, a lot of career growth from. Now, these are not necessarily bad things to do, but it usually is a more valuable opportunity to look for work in the gaps. So think about these two things. The next time you're trying to understand, okay, what could I do? You know, in your next conversation with your manager about career growth, talk about these two opportunities. What are some opportunities, some problems that you see that are unexplored, that we don't really have anybody attacking those problems? And I guarantee you, a good manager will hear this as an opportunity for them as well. Right. And having an engineer or having a, especially like a staff engineer. Right. Having a manager, maybe your boss is a director. Having a manager who says, what are some unexplored areas, some unexplored problem areas that represent low hanging fruit that I could go and tackle? These are things that we want, that leaders want, good managers want from their reports. They just don't necessarily know how to figure out what those gaps necessarily are. So it's if you open that conversation with your manager. I can almost guarantee. Your manager is going to take advantage of this. They're going to put you in positions where you have the opportunity to chase down the low hanging fruit that lives in the gaps. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of developer T. If you found it valuable and leave a review on iTunes, this is the best way to help developer T continue to reach more engineers like you. iTunes has been around forever and it continues to be the kind of primary platform. So that's my, my one app. Ask is if you listen to this through iTunes, especially go ahead and leave a review in iTunes. 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