We got several questions and comments on our last post. It appears the advice to ignore the job description was controversial! We’ll elaborate our thoughts here.
A job description outlines the roles and responsibilities of your position. It lists the things you are “expected” to do. This is the minimum requirement for you to stay in your job. In other words, if you aren’t doing everything in your job description, your job is at stake! Therefore, doing everything that’s in your job description doesn’t qualify you for a promotion or good performance rating.
If you want to shine, you need to either 1) Do things not in your job description or 2) Do things in your job description so well that you clearly do it better than others.
If you are a software engineer, then you are expected to write bug-free code. That’s basic. It won’t help you stand out. But for example, if you come up with ideas, processes, tools to speed up the process of writing code that will differentiate you. Or you write better code than others - code that uses less system resources, can be reused when needed, is easy to maintain in the future, etc.
Job description gives you the direction so you know what you need to focus on. But it doesn’t dictate the speed. If you want to grow faster, you need to act accordingly.