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> That being said, I fully agree with the article's framing of this view as simply saying that talented developers need a healthy working environment in order t

> That being said, I fully agree with the article's framing of this view as simply saying that talented developers need a healthy working environment in order to reach their potential. The flip side being, a talented developer might not want to join a company where an engineer like that has been the top dog (and the people below haven’t been around enough to have an idea what being a senior engineer is about). It just ends in tears and frustration for the ”talented developer.”

wutbrodo 6y ago
In my experience, a side effect of a healthy working environment for one person is that it's a healthy working environment for everyone. There have been a couple of teams I've been in a position of technical leadership and/or been better than the rest of the team on all or some relevant technical axes. In all of these cases, even if I was being 100% selfish, I would still _want_ to grow the people under me, since the stuff they grow into is the stuff I want to grow out of. As a concrete example, I'm currently the TL of a team, with a primary personal focus on ML, and it's been a huge win-win to hand off ML system maintenance tasks to non-ML engineers. These tasks provide them valuable exposure to the way ML production systems work, familiarity with ML workflows/tooling, and practice reasoning about ML systems. But they also free my time up of tedious, straightforward little tasks, to work on things that challenge me more. It's win-win-win, as the company is getting a more efficient and productive allocation of resources too.