Work given is not in my area of interest, how to approach my manager?

Question

I joined my company about a year ago, just out of college with a Masters in computer science. I work in a service based company and my profile can be closest described as 'data engineer/analyst'.

Initially there was a lot to learn in the project assigned to me and corporate life in general but my learning graph has become stagnant from last 3-4 months as now all I do is documentation and other adhoc requests and BAU ( business as usual - documents, emails etc) work. I complained a bit and was assigned more work - more BAU to be precise.

3 months ago I had ownership of 1 big maintenance project with rare occasional CRs (change request) , these CRs being the only ones where I learnt anything! Now I have been assigned 2 more small maintenance projects with absolutely no CRs.

Recently there was a big reorg in the company and I would soon be reporting a new manager, I was hoping to get some new work but instead the new person just wants to increase my BAU ( From current 80-20 between me and my manager to 95-5).

My current manager asks me to improve on current processes and make them more efficient(where i feel i might have some learning) but I rarely get anytime because by having so much boring tasks already lined up when I arrive in the morning. Being a computer science post grad I feel I am rusting my skills with having written no code in past 2-3 months.

Also it's not like there is no work in the company, it's growing fast and many projects have started but all people around me seem to move on to newer projects while I keep getting their work. I recently also got work of a person who moved to a new development project who is level 1(also gets lots of negative reviews from team mates ), while I am level 2. I feel like being demoted.

My communication with my manager is baked about new upcoming projects where they see me, but these projects come and get assigned to other people and all I am dumped with these people's older work And whenever I ask my manager of any gaps I can fill, I just get quite good positive reviews with no complaints so I am not sure what is that I am lacking.

Due to personal reasons I don't plan to switch before 8-10 months but I feel I would lose all my skills till then. Also I like my company's culture and everything. So I want to improve my current situation. I have a quarterly connect coming up and how should I approach this without sounding too rude.

Answer 1

You're getting a new manager. That's great, its an opportunity for you to establish some lines of communication. Its possible they simply don't understand the value you could be delivering, having a software engineer working on non-se tasks is, generally a waste of money. So arrange a meeting with your new manager, and present your business reasons for doing less BAU work. The following points stick out

1. BAU work is not actually making use of the skills they hired you for

2. You're happy to automate BAU work, but for that to be possible, you need less of it, or some designated amount of time a day to focus on automation

3. Ultimately, doing all this BAU work is making you unhappy

There's a real chance that your manager just wont care. In which case you're going to have to find work arounds, such as: get less BAU work done, if you're comforted, explain that you were told to automate some of it, so that's what you're focusing on, and that you can only do so much in a day.

Ultimately, you might just have to go find a new job where the expectations are different. This might mean keeping from being rusty by spending time working on your skills on your off time.