How do I deal with a lack of meaningful tasks? [duplicate]

Question

I'm a recent graduate working with a small-medium sized company.

I've completed my first project last week and have been assigned to do an enhancement on one of our products. In the past few days, I've set up the development environment correctly and have read through the old documentation/code provided. However, there's been no news on what enhancement I would be doing.

I have contacted my supervisors only to get a reply of "you should read up on [existing feature] as you'll probably be adding [existing feature] in some pages". (likely to be a button linking to the existing feature's page.)

Management's really busy with other projects, I may have to sit through a week or two without any interaction at this rate.

What are my options?

Answer 1

This sometimes happens, and it is not necessarily a bad thing.

If it is something for a couple of days, just listen to your supervisors and read the documentation - you may really need that knowledge later.

It you have slightly more time without any assignment, you can become proactive and start reviewing other places of the codebase of your company. The more you learn know about how your peers works, the more productive you will become and the better opinion your colleagues (and managers) will have about you. Also, do not limit yourself to the codebase, but try to learn about other things that could be useful (data sources, teams organization, who-to-ask-for-what).

It even more time goes by (more than a week?), you have finished reading what your supervisor pointed out and you are still without any assignment, then you have a problem to deal with: Go talk with your manager and let him know that you have completed all your assignments. This should be enough to fix the issue.