Comment by kylecazar
1 year ago
I think it's fine (necessary?) to have people who fill gaps, it keeps morale high when everyone is spread paper thin. But it's better for those same people to ALSO have some core competencies in which they are capable of diving deep and being a direct contributor.
I think the mistake often made is people think that "filling in the gaps" isn't a core competency in which one can dive deep. I once had the pleasure of working at a position with a "SME" type person who was the sort of person that loved writing and collating documentation about things. If you ever had a question about what led to a decision 5 years ago, or how two parts of the system interacted with each other, or where the original specification for the obscure data format we were parsing cam from, they were the person to go to. They somehow managed to accumulate the sort of internal knowledge base that most companies only ever dream of, and very few ever get close to no matter how many Confluence seats they buy or wiki servers they stand up. They knew exactly who to talk to about any given part of the system if they didn't have the answers themselves. They were not a technical person, they couldn't write a line of code, they weren't a customer facing role, they weren't a manager. But filling in all of the gaps between all of those things was something they did extremely well, and there was more than enough depth there to make a career out of. I've never had such a person on my teams before or since, though I often strive to be at least 10% of the person they were for my teams because what they provided was invaluable to anyone with eyes to see it for what it was.