But if they are going to cancel it anyway I would rather at least code and build just to have fun and at least have a prototype rather than doing the boring work. Also I feel like I can't get into right frame of mind of problem solving by writing a doc compared to if I am coding.
If they like coding and didn't want to prioritize career advancement I would tell them to put effort into finding the projects (or parts of projects) they find more interesting to code and make sure they get assigned that. My advice was always personalized. The thing is that for most early career engineers they are already coding enough (and it's not like the code is generally particularly interesting) so most of the time the advice is to do more docs since the lack of docs was hurting them for perf/grad but it varied from individual to individual
If the project is anyway eventually going to be deprecated and shutdown, maybe it's better to take one of the Google bike and go round the campus drinking one of these tasty granitas from the cafeteria.
The craziest thing to me is that at my location not that many people did the free workout classes. Between those classes and the food I was in the best shape of my life while working there.
I steadily got in better shape as they kept cancelling the projects I worked on and I slowly lost and sort of will to care about my actual job. The quality of my work ended up suffering a lot as I realized just how pointless trying to work there was for me but the pay was too good to want to leave.
Edit: I was unlucky though. I knew some people with more stable projects. I went through 4 cancelled projects in close to 6 years
