Workplace reflection

I Want to Play Chess. Why Am I Being Asked to Play Ludo?

When coordination work crowds out meaningful practice, engineering leaders face a difficult question: what is this job helping me become?

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A hand holds an ivory chess knight between a wooden chessboard and a colorful ludo board with playing pieces and a die.

You had planned to spend the afternoon thinking through an architectural decision. Instead, you are rearranging boxes in a presentation.

The next morning, you explain why adding people will not immediately shorten a delivery timeline. The explanation is understood. Someone asks for a more polished version for the steering committee.

By Friday, the technical problem remains untouched. The presentation has reached version seven.

You have worked hard all week. You are less certain what you have become better at.

“I want to play chess,” you think, “but I keep being asked to play ludo.”

For an engineering leader, that sentence can capture the frustration of having abilities you rarely get to exercise. You want to reason through difficult trade-offs, develop people, and build something that lasts. Your calendar keeps returning you to status summaries, formatting, and explanations repackaged for another audience.

The metaphor describes a mismatch between the challenge you seek and the work you repeatedly receive. It needs that boundary: treating colleagues or their work as beneath you makes the underlying problem harder to discuss.

But the problem deserves a discussion.

Company value and personal growth

Work can be useful to the company while offering you little further growth.

A business needs coordination. People need to understand what is happening, where the risks are, and which decisions require attention. Someone has to make that information accessible.

Yet the value of a task to the organization and its developmental value to the person doing it are separate questions.

The company may benefit from the twentieth revision of a familiar presentation. You may learn almost nothing from producing it.

That is an uncomfortable asymmetry. Your salary compensates you for your contribution, but your time also determines which capabilities you get to practice. A role can meet the first obligation while leaving you increasingly dissatisfied with the second.

You probably did not enter engineering hoping your signature skill would become aligning shapes in PowerPoint.

There is nothing embarrassing about doing that work. The concern is how much of your working life it consumes.

Repeated over months, small assignments become a pattern of practice. You gain experience in what you repeatedly do. The work you continually postpone receives fewer chances to develop.

A full calendar can therefore conceal a neglected ambition.

Which part requires your judgment?

There is, however, a difficult question worth asking before dismissing the next presentation: what part of this task actually requires judgment?

Explaining why a migration deserves funding can sharpen strategic thinking. Making a technical risk understandable can improve your ability to lead. Choosing which details an executive needs can demand a sophisticated understanding of the business.

Communication belongs in an engineering leader’s craft.

But those benefits do not automatically extend to every round of cosmetic revision. Once the reasoning is clear, another afternoon of adjusting layout may contribute very little to it.

Consider two requests:

“Show us the trade-off between delaying the migration and accepting another year of operational risk.”
“Keep the recommendation unchanged, but rebuild these slides in the other template.”

Both produce a deck. They offer different opportunities to exercise judgment.

That distinction gives you a more precise way to describe the frustration. It also leaves room to discover that some work you initially resented is developing a capability you actually need.

An engineering leader pauses beside an open system-design notebook and printed slides, with a presentation on the laptop.

Purpose, choice, and room to grow

Research on work motivation offers a useful lens here. Marylène Gagné and Edward Deci describe the importance of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, while also explaining that people can willingly undertake uninteresting tasks when they accept their purpose. Enjoyment is not a prerequisite for every worthwhile responsibility. Self-determination theory and work motivation.

Applied to this situation, the reflection becomes more specific: do I understand the purpose, have a reasonable say in the method, and have enough opportunities elsewhere to stretch my abilities?

Sometimes the answer reveals a temporary burden. Sometimes it reveals the shape of the job.

Make the trade-off visible

Before your next conversation with your manager, examine a recent week. Identify the recurring task, the time it took, the decision it supported, and the work it displaced. Include the possibility that your audience needed context you already take for granted.

Then make the trade-off visible:

“The weekly update is useful for surfacing delivery risks. Preparing it is also taking the time we had allocated to the reliability review. Could we agree on a standard format, limit revisions to changes that affect decisions, and protect that review time?”

This gives your manager something concrete to evaluate.

You can also ask for an explicit development commitment: ownership of a difficult decision, regular involvement in design reviews, or a sustained opportunity to coach other engineers. Make the opportunity part of the work allocation. Relying on leftover time leaves it vulnerable to every urgent request.

Seven questions for your next step

For your own reflection, work through these questions:

  1. What recurring assignment triggered this frustration, and what did it displace?
  2. What do I feel most strongly: boredom, resentment, anxiety about stagnation, or disappointment?
  3. What conclusion am I drawing about how the company sees me? What evidence supports it?
  4. Which capability do I want to develop, and what actual practice would develop it?
  5. What does the person requesting this work need to understand or accomplish?
  6. Which parts require my judgment, and which could be simplified, standardized, or stopped?
  7. What specific change will I request, and when will I review whether it happened?

The answers may point toward a better arrangement. They may also reveal that the organization needs a role you no longer want to spend your career performing. Reflection cannot create opportunities that the company is unwilling to offer, but it can help you name the mismatch clearly.

You can accept that some routine work is necessary and still care deeply about what your working years are building.

Before opening the next deck, write down one sentence:

“The capability I want my work to strengthen this year is…”

Then look at your calendar and find where you will practice it.

Start a private check-in with that sentence, or explore daily reflection with DeepMirror. For a related perspective, read Why Inner Clarity Can Matter More Than Expertise.

Further reading