Comment by rsynnott

Depends what they’re doing, and how junior the team is. For something relatively involved, with a few new-ish grads, or people inexperienced with the problem domain, on the team, it wouldn’t be surprising. Shows up particularly often in rapidly-growing companies, where by necessity teams are often mostly new-ish.

Now, ideally you do not lean on a single Tim to make this work; that’s kind of a failure mode (I’ve occasionally been a sort of a temporary Tim, but the goal would always be to move the team more towards self-sufficiency to avoid becoming a perma-Tim.) A part-time Tim, who consistently spends part of their time unblocking others, is IME a fairly common phenomenon, and probably necessary.