There’s a similar situation when a senior person devotes themself to the sort of coding project that any midlevel engineer could have taken on: you’re going to do a stellar job on it, but chances are there’s a senior-sized problem available that the midlevel engineer wouldn’t be able to tackle. To use an idiom my kid dropped profoundly one day, “You don’t plant grass in your only barrel.” Be wary of choosing a project that already has a lot of senior people on it. Scope out who else is working on the problem and whether they seem likely to succeed at solving it. Some projects may even be
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