Comment by ajmurmann
2 years ago
Or worse: People get stuck quite frequently and ask you for help pretty quickly. You get everyone unstuck, but your own work falls behind and when your boss's boss asks for metrics on developers you have few points delivered and few LOC changed. Your boss tries to explain, but your head is the one that rolls next when layoffs happen.
As a senior engineer I've learned that is my job. I take on much less work than anyone else because I know I will be called on to solve those problems.
This is in fact known in management literature: assign your best people to the least important project. That way the second best can grow to become the best, while the best are always free to help out if your fourth most important project has issues - it isn't a big deal if your least important project doesn't get done on time and if they manage to finish it so much the better. (your best are also free should sales discover a short window where a quick feature can bring in a large sale - though this is obviously easy to abuse)
> your own work falls behind
which is why one should not self-sacrifice. It garners no reward for one. Secondly, if the boss doesn't realize how much of an enabler you are, then it's time to start looking for a new job before the layoffs even starts as a thought in the boss' head.
Great workers know when they can help others without falling behind themselves. Or have good communication skills to explain what they were doing.
Or are good at communicating and don't need to do anything because they can just lie.
Well at some point you expect some artifacts to show up, even if not just code, design docs, RFCs, code reviews, something. If there truly is nothing I don't think that's a viable way to contribute either. Sure one can "only help others" but all good engineers I've worked with can help others and still do their main tasks, and if they get to a point where they are a point of reference for everyone else and everyone else gets blocked without them this is a high priority thing to fix in the team, probably one of the highest priority things to fix.
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