This kind of job is unlikely to be conducive to deliberate practice. If your intention is to improve your understanding of algorithms, for example, practice implementing and analyzing algorithms at just above your current level. Here you have little control over your time, which is spread thin. You're on call all the time, so that your focus is fractionated. You may even become dependent on the short-term satisfaction you get from completing many small assignments without warning, while your peremptory, offensively smug manager unhelpfully demands that you explain why some internal web site isn't up to date (someone else left out an expiration date), and points out that if in the future you have to be reminded, the unconscionable error of omission must be immediately corrected; and by the way, a a slide show is needed for presentation by noon. Before you go, order software by 9 AM on your credit card if you have to and install it by 10AM--timing is crucial, only you find out the software company is a sole proprietorship in another time zone where it is 3 AM; get the online store running without the help of the retail people or any testing whatsoever with the payment gateway; and while you're at it do a quick PHP fix to the most elaborate routine in the system, not to mention a patch to the store because the US Postal Service modified its REST endpoint--without the patch no one can specify USPS shipping and only priority mail works, but site went down and you call the hosting facility to log a ticket (oops, a switch--a point of failure--failed). While you juggle mutually exclusive priorities, your manager's manager calls to explain that the users cannot upload videos on wifi connections using http--absolutely unacceptable: do something about this immediately! Without testing you attempt to install a gridFTP service, but installation requires the --skip-broken option in the yum package manager, which may or may not work; now it's 11 PM and you've been there since 8 AM, but you need to provide instructions to unsophisticated users who prefer moralizing to problem-solving, while you update the header of a web site by appending an image to an overgrown CSS sprite, but this is interrupted by a rude text in from your manager, whose insists that an extremely important email is nowhere in the 160,000 message inbox on his phone (he refuses to archive his mail)--it is your responsibility to explain why he didn't receive it; but he did receive it--you produce the delivery header, but as usual there is no response, except for an email that a home-grown DVD has to be produced, which means remembering photoshop macros to resize the borders to the right aspect ratio, only the deadline for the jQuery Mobile application is tomorrow...
I'm as guilty a generalist as any, yet I'm happy straddling several disciplines.
There's a broader argument for and against "specialization" i.e. studying other disciplines yields perspective etc.
At any rate, I'll share the ways I'm solving it presently:
* reduce the number of disciplines required to be effective
* confront human resource management problems
* build funnels to save time or improve process
I suppose I'm advocating tackling fundamental leadership problems in an organization :/
If you have any advice or ideas you can share I'd surely love to hear them.
These days I tend to believe more in the power of environments and systems than the in power of individuals. Sometimes you may have good interaction separately with individual I and individual J, but unfavorable interaction with the set {I, J}. This is to say that I find that systems of any complexity and organizations of any size are impenetrable. I have limited power to change them--as much power as I do to change the weather.
This has the consequence that I prefer migration from inhospitable climates to hunkering down in the antarctic with no snow boots. Quit early and often for me means that you are better off finding and working within a good system than sinking your time and energy attempting to change a bad system. If you have no power to affect "fundamental leadership" problems in an organization, my suggestion is to find another organization--if you can afford it.
