You're Not Blocked. Your Work Is.

What my grandfather understood about being indispensable Let me tell you about the most productive week of my career, during which I accomplished absolutely nothing of value and was lavishly praised for it. I was brand new to the company, early career. First week on the team, still learning where the coffee was, still doing that thing where you laugh a beat late at jokes you didn't understand because you don't yet know all the context. And the fellow who wrote the .NET side of our little operation, the man whose code my code was supposed to talk to, went on vacation. For a week. Of course, he was entitled to have a vacation, and I want to state that clearly and without sarcasm, because I'm about to spend a thousand words making his vacation sound like the Hindenburg, and none of this was his fault. The work in front of me needed his endpoints. His endpoints did not exist. He wasn’t there to write them. I was a frontend person who was, at that point in his life, generously descr