“I do not have a task”

Showing initiative to help yourself

Start ups are considered (by some) as best opportunity to advance one’s career. Irrespective of your years of experience or previous background, start ups will let you work on variety of tasks without specifying boundary.

It is sad when a start up employee says or thinks “I am done working on what I was asked, and have no next task”

Unless it is your first day/week, you probably know the pulse of the organization. You also (should) know various projects/products/initiatives being perused.

Start ups are always short of resources. There is always more work than people available. Show initiative, that is the only way to grow. If you keep expecting “work to be assigned” to you, you are probably not a good fit for a start up.

What are the various things one can do when waiting for formally being assigned the next task ?

• Look at the bug tracking system : see which bugs/features you can address and volunteer for those. Even if you do not end up working on it, at least you would have now understood — probably unknown till now — part of the code.
• Learn new technology : This might be more time consuming, but you should be doing this anyway, probably along with your main assignment.
• Make performance improvements : Depending on the time you have till the next assignment, this may or may not be possible. But you can get started ☺
• Review code written by peers. This helps you learn to write better code, also helps you reduce code review comments if any, especially if you are a junior associate.
• Check to see if you can help with non-development related work, and expand your mind by knowing other parts of business. This could be looking at front end code, if you are a back end developer, or vice versa.
• You can also try to get involved in non-technical work. Create an internal company newsletter. Try out new tools company can use for collaboration. Update the documentation. Write up suggested updates for the company website and send suggestions to the founders. If the company facebook/twitter account is non-functional or not well utilized, volunteer to run that. (Thanks Navin Kabra , for suggesting this entire bullet)
• Try to learn more about the domain you are working on. This might help you understand implicit requirements in your field of work.