Comment by loeg

I agree that it seems like a weird distribution of time for someone senior. It's fine and good to mentor juniors or pair some of the time but I think that in general pairing is net less effective than two people working individually. Seniors certainly and usually team leads are expected to deliver some individual work product. You can definitely help make teammates more effective without spending all of your time on their shoulder.

Also: the business established a metric it wanted ICs to meet, the guy in the story refused to participate in it at all. At the very least, he's demonstrating resistance to following the expectations of leadership. He might be a good team player at the smallest scope, but great engineers can do that and simultaneously play along with management/biz interests.

(I'll also agree with the article that measuring "story points" or whatever is probably a bad metric, like most measures of software productivity.)