When it’s something this trivially small, why don’t you just… do it? So long as you can demonstrate your ability to deliver on “real” work, why not just knock these tiny things out too if you can? Work it into an adjacent change if that comes up. “But my manager and PM and CEO all say this is ILLEGAL TO DO” always seems to be the answer… but if your company isn’t completely rotten to the core with toxic waste, I don’t think anyone is going to axe you for making small microscopic incremental product improvements…
Because it’s not small. Doing what the article describes takes a very significant amount of time. Especially compared to a much more directly estimated and measurable action like “add x feature”. Doing what is described halfway will likely return poor results since noticing the subtle things like the example given only happens when trying many times with a tendency to try random things that you didn’t before. Who purposefully clicks somewhere they never did before, QA people. Most engineers are not QA, and they don’t even begin to think in a way that leads them to try things that they didn’t before just to try to find a few pixels of unclickable UI. Your assumption that the kind of work described is small is a much bigger problem than any so called assumption that blaming the PM and CEO is at fault.
