The Most Unusual Request from Management: When Your Job Description Gets Rewritten

As a seasoned backend web developer, my career has equipped me with a broad skill set to handle a variety of technical challenges—ranging from server management and database architecture to API integrations and security protocols. However, recently, I found myself facing a request that was, to say the least, outside the scope of my typical responsibilities.

The situation arose when my supervisor approached me with an innovative yet perplexing idea: developing an Artificial Intelligence (AI) model capable of analyzing players in uploaded videos, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and determining their potential for recruitment—much like a professional scouting tool.

The Task at Hand

Here’s what my boss envisioned: a platform where users could upload videos of athletes, and an AI system would scrutinize these footage snippets to evaluate individual performance metrics. The ultimate goal? To provide a comprehensive report on whether a player is worth considering for recruitment, streamlining talent identification processes.

While the concept is ambitious and promising, it immediately raised a series of questions for me. First and foremost: am I the right person to build such an AI model? After all, my core expertise is in backend development, not AI research or Machine Learning model development.

Assessing the Feasibility

I took a moment to research existing solutions. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find publicly available models that perform this specific task. The closest approximation I discovered was certain mobile applications that analyze athletic performance—but those are typically built using proprietary models or heavily customized AI systems. Even more, many of these tools leverage large language models like ChatGPT, which are generalized and not specifically trained for performance analysis in sports footage.

The Reality of the Request

My concern is not just about my capability but also about the practicality of the project. Developing a reliable AI model for player analysis involves complex computer vision techniques, extensive training data, and specialized expertise in sports analytics and machine learning—none of which are part of my current skill set.

Moreover, integrating such an AI into our platform would require substantial resource allocation, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and potential development of proprietary datasets—factors that are significantly beyond the scope of standard backend maintenance.

Reflections and Takeaways

This experience highlights a common scenario in tech workplaces: management’s enthusiasm for innovative ideas sometimes leads to requests that stretch or even ignore the boundaries of existing roles and expertise. While innovative thinking is vital, it’s equally important to assess the feasibility and resource implications of such ambitious