Comment by stephen_g
2 years ago
That’s good feedback I think.
There’s an article that was going around again about ‘glue work’ ([1]) that has a story where an engineer gets caught up doing all this kind of mentoring, coordination and other work like that and then is passed over for promotions because they don’t have technical achievements (though they claim to have become instrumental in enabling everyone else’s technical achievements).
The article never gets to quite the right conclusion - it’s actually massive management failure - what I was thinking the whole way through was “why hasn’t somebody sat them down and told them to do their actual job??”
Mentoring and code review are both super important, but if the organisation wants you to focus on getting tickets done then you basically just have to, unless you can convince them to actually add the additional work to your actual role description or get enough seniority to add it yourself.
But it’s good to have feedback on what kind of work you’re actually going to be measured on in performance reviews, promotions etc.
If you're a senior engineer, mentoring junior engineers IS your actual job, in addition to the coding work. It's arguably the more important part of your job description because junior engineers write most of the code, so you get far more done via mentoring than you do typing on a keyboard
I think this is an important perspective - in the end you need to do what the company asks of you and not what you think is right for the company if the two are in conflict.