Comment by bruce343434

You're both right, unfortunately - which makes it hard to ever consistently choose a path. Many people are stuck in the middle of the two sides in lots of orgs.

Your tedious tasks are important. But some of your research/autonomous work is important as well. But both are sometimes hugely wasteful as well. I'm regularly reminded that someone more senior can ascribe "business value" to something and push that to the top of your priority list even when that thing isn't valuable.

To me, as a manager, it's worth thinking about it from the perspective of praise. People might feel better if you're reminding them that the tedious stuff IS actually important, IS actually valuable (and why), and etc. And it's important to tell folks to share their side/research efforts as well. I've neglected to share so many of these little efforts over the years, but feel that they're almost always well received.

Last part said a different way. Share something, get the response, and then do what you can to connect and make it more relevant to a real problem or issue if it's not already.

I see this a lot at my current job. The tech stack is ridiculously complicated and I think a lot of it is due to this sort of motivation. They let developers run wild and build using whatever tools or new hotness that they wanted. But ultimately we sell Widgets. And the 3rd refactoring of an application to use some immutable data library doesn't do anything to help us sell more Widgets.

So yes, we have happy developers that have good morale. But we also have probably twice the number we need because nobody put their foot down and said "this is work, not play".