A couple of months into my first real engineering job, I got handed a team to run and a fifty-percent raise. I'd love to tell you it was because I was the sharpest coder there. It wasn't. It was something far more boring, and far more repeatable.
The setup
My first job out of Carnegie Mellon was at Agot, a computer-vision startup founded by some CMU folks. The product is genuinely clever: cameras that check whether a fast-food order was actually made right — if you ordered a burger with lettuce and the kitchen forgot it, the system catches the mismatch between what was prepared and what was rung up, and pings the worker before it gets bagged.
I joined at $100k as one of the early employees, watching the company grow from two people at a desk toward the fifty it would become. Everyone wanted the glamorous work: the models, the demos, the stuff you can show off in a standup.
I took the other thing.
The unglamorous thing nobody wanted
The Platform team owned the plumbing — the infrastructure everything else quietly depended on. It wasn't flashy. It didn't make for a good demo. It was the layer people only noticed when it broke. So nobody was fighting for it.
Within a couple of months, I was running it, and my pay jumped to $150k. Not because I out-coded anyone. Because I'd made myself responsible for the thing the whole product stood on top of — and once you own the foundation, you stop being a line item and start being load-bearing.
The principle I've watched hold up everywhere since:
"When you increase your value and you have any kind of surface area, it shows very quickly."— from my notes on building
Owning the unglamorous foundation is surface area. Every team that depends on your layer is a team that notices when you make their life easier. Glamorous work competes with everyone else's glamorous work. Foundational work competes with no one, because no one else wants it.
The honest footnote
I'll add the part most career posts leave out, because I've written a whole essay on schools teaching me to forget and I'd be a hypocrite to flex without it: getting handed responsibility fast is not the same as using it well. At both my jobs I had a bad habit of dodging the genuinely hard, scary problems for fear of looking dumb — which protected my ego and quietly capped how much I actually grew. The promotion was real. So was the ceiling I built on it myself.
So take the useful half and skip the part I got wrong: find the thing everyone needs and no one wants, and own it. It'll get you noticed faster than any feature will. Just don't mistake the title for the growth — that's a separate job, and you have to give yourself that one.
It's the same instinct I point at my own projects now. The boring foundation is almost always where the leverage is hiding.