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> "the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others" > "For more senior engineers, it can happen because t

> "the biggest mistake I see engineers make is doing too much work on their own before looping in others" > "For more senior engineers, it can happen because they like to work on their own and may be overconfident in finding solutions. It can also happen if the team culture is toxic and engineers fear getting criticism early in the design process." Not saying the above statement is incorrect but here is an alternative explanation that is also viable: Senior Engineers are often hired into large large projects so that the company has the capability to address emergencies or modify the existing system accurately as it is often more difficult to work on a large complex code base than to build a new one from scratch. Those engineers sometimes never get to work on greenfield projects and "doing too much work on their own before looping in others" is a way to scratch this itch without the opportunity being taken away prematurely. It also offers chance to produce memorable work as nobody remembers the set of 3 point tasks you completed ten sprints ago.

abofh 5y ago
You are not wrong. I generally sell as a mercenary, and prefer it that way - I've been doing this longer than some of my managers have been alive. I'm paid just as well if they want to "pair program" or jira the whole process, but yeah, you hired me to fix a problem - if you are the problem, I get paid just the same. Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer
- Victerius 5y ago
  > I've been doing this longer than some of my managers have been alive. In what organisation do 25 year olds manage 50 year olds?
  - ttymck 5y ago
    Could a 30 year old manage a 60 year old? Certainly a 35 year old could manage a 57 year old?
    - bayindirh 5y ago
      If the 60 year old is wise and humble and 30 year old is open minded and not smug, it'd create a hell of a learning environment.
    - FpUser 5y ago
      Definitely. Just do not micromanage and drag to endless useless meetings.
  - scrumbledober 5y ago
    I have met several engineers that were very much senior to their managers but did not want to make the shift from IC to management.
  - Hermitian909 5y ago
    I've known people who submitted working patches to the Linux kernel at 13, which I'd say is a reasonable start for "doing this". A 30 year old managing a 43 year old would not be strange at all.
    - dhosek 5y ago
      Exactly, I started programming in AppleSoft BASIC when I was 11, picked up 6502 Assembly and Pascal before high school and added C, Rexx. 370 assembler and FORTRAN before I started college. I was 28 the first time I had a manager younger than me. I think the last time I had a manager older than me was when I had a job where my direct report was to the CTO.
  - galdosdi 5y ago
    Anecdote, but this was the approximate case on the team I worked on at Google (Manager in his mid 30s, team mostly in their 20s with one in his 50s). It happens. Actually, it was nice to see, as some evidence of non-ageism. I hope to no longer need to work by the time I'm 50, but nobody knows what the future will bring, so I'd certainly like to have the option just in case!
  - imoverclocked 5y ago
    A lot. Technical managers need not be experienced technical talents who have made a potentially incompatible shift to management.
    - icedchai 5y ago
      It is better if the managers of technical people are technical themselves. Otherwise you wind up with the Dilbert "pointy-haired-boss" syndrome. The non-technical manager is extremely easy to bullshit, so it's better for the company in almost all ways.
      - ipaddr 5y ago
        An experienced manager is not easy to bullshit regardless. Sometimes a non-technical manager is better for many reasons. Having business domain experience can be just as valuable
        lostcolony 5y ago
        I have encountered non-technical managers who were good, but in every case they would have been better still had they had some technical background. I have encountered technical managers who were not good, for various reasons. I think having a technical background is always a benefit, HOWEVER, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good manager.
        paulcole 5y ago
        The same is true of software engineers. Every single one of them would be better if they had more of a non-technical background.
        lostcolony 5y ago
        Yep; though enough time working for companies tends to instill some knowledge and understanding of the business side of things, and as long as understanding of the business correlates with their own influence it tends to work out okay. Management is weird in that understanding of the tech side of things doesn't correlate with influence.
  - Ensorceled 5y ago
    My first job out of university, I was promoted to manager in my mid 20s. One of the senior engineers reporting to me had kids older than me. Now, they were PAID a lot more than me ... The first thing they taught me was that it wasn't my job to do the work, because it didn't matter how smart I was, I didn't have almost 30 years experience.
  - superfrank 5y ago
    I worked at a start up where the founders were 25 & 26 and most of their first 25 employees were their friends who were similar aged. In less than two years, there were almost 100 employees, plenty of which were in the 50s. The company's last valuation has it worth over a billion dollars now and they have a few hundred employees. A good chunk of the C suite and VPs are still those same early employees who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are managing former FAANG employees in their 50s.
    - jsprogram 5y ago
      Which one was it?
  - SkyPuncher 5y ago
    Not as extreme, but not far off. I believe I'm the youngest person on the team I manage. I've spent a lot of time in startups - including way too many hours in my 20's working on side-hustles (wife was in med school, so it was kind of my thing to do). I've ended up in a situation where my technical skills are strong (but not the best on my team), but my business/startup knowledge is much better so I can help to ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful/valuable outcomes.
  - mbrameld 5y ago
    It's not unusual in the US military for a lieutenant or captain in their early 20s to manage many senior non-commissioned officers in their late 40s.
    - dfsegoat 5y ago
      No mil. experience myself, but I'd say that while the officers may technically 'manage' the NCO's, that with few exceptions it is the NCO's that actually get things done.
      - throwawayboise 5y ago
        Yeah the officers all move on relatively quickly; the NCOs may be on the same ship or class of ship their entire career.
  - asow92 5y ago
    A few years ago, I was a "team lead" at the age of 27 managing a team that included one developer over 50 at a big TV network company. We're both at different companies nowadays, but I've been trying to get him started at my current company's team (which I am senior on, but not a lead) for a while now and he's considering it!
  - smcleod 5y ago
    In a previous job I was team lead of a team that had a person in they're 40s and one in their 50s, I started as lead as a 23 year old and moved on when I was 30. There are many things I'd do differently now, but it was an effective and impactful mostly high functioning team. It does happen.
  - perfect_wave 5y ago
    I'm a 25 year old managing a global team of 8 people. I'm self-conscious about my age both in my 1:1s with my reports and when talking with customers. That being said, it seems like things are going well. My team is doing great metrics and achievements wise and the company we work for tripled in size in under a year.
    - foobarian 5y ago
      You know what I usually tell my managers. "Thank you for your service" :-)
  - ipaddr 5y ago
    Many organizations and it is a normal thing.
  - buttercraft 5y ago
    I used to work for a company in which employees in some departments would do 2 or 3 year "shifts" as managers. When your shift was up, you went back to a regular employee in the same department, and someone you had been managing took over. It was not uncommon to have a young manager, but not everyone was eligible, obviously. I think it prevented the "us vs. them" mentality from creeping in, and I got the impression that most managers were eager to return to production work. There were dedicated managers higher up the ladder, of course.
    - grp000 5y ago
      How did that work out overall? I really like that idea, but I haven't heard of it before. People seem very motivated to stick to career tracks.
      - pjscott 5y ago
        I’m also intrigued. I’ve seen this happen several times but always de facto: someone would become a manager as an experiment, try it for a few years, and then (usually) decide to stop.
      - buttercraft 5y ago
        They're still doing exceedingly well, so it must not have hurt them. I think it takes a small but stable company to pull it off. Maybe they have stopped doing it by now, I don't know. These people cared about their work a lot, and they enjoyed doing it. Not sure which way the causation goes though... Edit to add: the rotating managers I'm referring to were doing budgets and performance reviews, not creating business strategies.
  - jacobyoder 5y ago
    I'm ... late 40s. Have been paid for working on software development in some capacity for... 28 years (first paid contract was 1993), and did hobby/amateur for several years before that. I'm contracting with a couple different companies, and one of them... the others on the team range from ... 27-32. So... I've been doing professional/paid development work longer than most of them have been alive, certainly longer than any of them have been adults. The manager(s) I interact with - one just turned 31, and one is... I think 29 or 30. The older you get the more common this may become.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  > Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. Ha! Yeah, I worked on a really cool project for a charity a few years ago: "How many hours is this going to cost us this week, you were working like a warrior?" "35"
- amelius 5y ago
  > If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer Lawyers must hate their work.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    I believe it has one of the lowest job satisfaction of any white collar jobs. I've wondered that is folks didnt have the massive student loans to pay off early on if they would stick with it.
    - BurningFrog 5y ago
      Many law firms are incredibly well paid sweatshops.
    - favorited 5y ago
      Never mind when law students graduate and go to work for the government, for a salary less than a year's tuition...
      - astrange 5y ago
        Don't they get student loan forgiveness? Or just all the other kinds of benefits.
        favorited 5y ago
        I can't speak to the general case, but I know that my brother didn't. As an ADA (living in an expensive US city) his salary is less than a first-year public school teacher with a bachelor's degree.
  - skissane 5y ago
    > Lawyers must hate their work. A friend of mine is a criminal defence lawyer. I get the impression he really enjoys his work – he gets to meet a lot of people he never normally would (bikie gang members, terrorists, murderers, drug dealers, drug addicts, etc) – and he feels safe in doing so (he tells me that defendants trying to harm their own lawyers is quite rare, rare enough that he isn't worried about it). Once, at a work function (previous employer), I met one of the lawyers from the contracts department. He was telling me how he used to live in a rural area doing agricultural real estate transactions, now he had moved to the big city to do in-house contracts review for a multinational software company. He was a "top performer" (indeed, this was a function to reward people who'd been nominated as "top performers" by their management)–but he didn't give me the impression he really loved what he did, more that he was just doing it to support his family.
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  I like the cut of your jib
- zomglings 5y ago
  Haha I like everything you said except the "pair program" bit. From my point of view as both a programmer and an employer, this is the cleanest way to make sure knowledge transfers between short-term and long-term team members. Why the disdain? (If I interpreted correctly.)
  - nine_zeros 5y ago
    Pairing is only helpful when you are new and learning from someone more experienced. However, it may be a time-sink for the more experienced person, who could be using their limited time on more critical things. That's why newbies get assigned a mentor, with whom they can pair freely. But pairing rigidly with the whole team just sucks and is incredibly unproductive.
    - zomglings 5y ago
      I don't think it's true that pairing is only helpful for new people learning from someone more experienced. But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe.
      - nine_zeros 5y ago
        > But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe. This is true. I have been on both sides of the pairing equation. I am currently on a team that pairs too often and I am annoyed on a daily basis because I could have been utilizing that same time for actual work. So yes, it's going to be difficult to convince me but feel free to take a stab.
        zomglings 5y ago
        Okay, there are three other common scenarios where I have observed pairing to be immensely valuable: 1. You are in the middle of a death march and pairing with a team mate gives both of you the moral fortitude to keep going (and keep your programs relatively correct and relatively secure). 2. You are working on a tedious but difficult task and working with a team mate makes it so that you are less likely to make mistakes despite the tedium (as well as gives you the moral fortitude to continue with the task). 3. You are working on a difficult problem and you have a team mate that you can truly collaborate with to find solutions neither of you would have found on your own. (The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.) In any of these cases, it is important to pair with someone compatible with you. And you can build compatibility over time.
zachlloyd 5y ago
i see the point here. i do think giving space for hard work is important. i still more often see the opposite problem of too much silo'd work leads to wasted effort, but for some really hard problems, having a bunch of space to think them through is beneficial.
6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
> It also offers chance to produce memorable work as nobody remembers the set of 3 point tasks you completed ten sprints ago. This is one of the more toxic ones. To get past senior, you often need to be seen to do Big Memorable Things. It sometimes leads to perverse incentives.
- belval 5y ago
  I mean it's not that toxic, if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance. Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc. I think a lot of people have weaker communication skills than execution skills. So they could loop in everyone early on, but their idea might get killed off because they failed to justify it properly. If instead they leverage their execution skills and make an MVP that will speak for itself, then they bypass that issue.
  - 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
    Maybe toxic is the wrong word. Perverse maybe. But I don’t think that being a good worker bee often gets people past the senior level, at least from what I’ve seen. But also getting past senior is rarer, so maybe what I’ve seen isn’t representative.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    >"if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance" And other than some bonus never promote you. If you have capability to be anything above that "worker bee" say / ask exactly what you want. If not look for another job. While this SCRUM / Agile bullshit is wide spread and even works in some specific circumstances there are enough companies that are not hung up on moving pins on dashboard and where one can really grow. Work for yourself. Work with the manager, not for manager.
    - belval 5y ago
      > Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc. I agree, that's exactly what I wrote.
ravenstine 5y ago
Yes, I think this is undoubtedly true. I didn't really learn until I advanced my career that, in some respects, being a junior or mid-level developer is actually better. Being a senior can be a slog, and while I got paid little in earlier positions, I actually got to do more interesting things, screw up more, and build things from scratch. The other thing that can encourage doing too much work before looping in others is the culture of the team. You are lucky if you can amass a team of people who all have the same attitude of talking to each other frequently and handling a certain level of interruption. I've worked on such teams and miss them. Although pretty much everyone at any company you work at will say "ask questions, don't hesitate, blah blah blah", there are teams where people go weeks not talking or sharing work, and everyone is always too busy to get interrupted. If work gets assigned in large chunks, as can happen for seniors in particular, it can also just not make sense to loop in someone temporarily if more time needs to be taken for the other person to catch up.
philote 5y ago
In my case, I'm the senior engineer and the rest of the team are juniors. There's generally not much I can ask them that they'd know the answer for. On the other hand, looping them in is a good learning experience for them even if they can't help me solve the issue. But due to time constraints that isn't always possible.
- EGreg 5y ago
  You nailed it. Senior engineers build things on their own because their company can’t afford to hire enough advanced enough people who can learn the system and take over the work without being trained for 6-12 months, and often there is no budget for this kind of ”distraction” from the core moneymaking path.
rory 5y ago
A good point, but the reason I have (and fight) this problem is much simpler: I like writing code. I dislike talking to people.
coryrc 5y ago
Or, you work at an organization which gates promotion on leading projects, so everyone has to lead things. Or your organization relies on "consensus" or "influence" to get any project done, and one of the groups (which don't share managers back to the ceo) doesn't want to do the project even though the others think it is important. So do you spend months trying to convince them while doing nothing promotion-worthy in your own?

abofh 5y ago

You are not wrong. I generally sell as a mercenary, and prefer it that way - I've been doing this longer than some of my managers have been alive. I'm paid just as well if they want to "pair program" or jira the whole process, but yeah, you hired me to fix a problem - if you are the problem, I get paid just the same. Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer

Victerius 5y ago
> I've been doing this longer than some of my managers have been alive. In what organisation do 25 year olds manage 50 year olds?
- ttymck 5y ago
  Could a 30 year old manage a 60 year old? Certainly a 35 year old could manage a 57 year old?
  - bayindirh 5y ago
    If the 60 year old is wise and humble and 30 year old is open minded and not smug, it'd create a hell of a learning environment.
  - FpUser 5y ago
    Definitely. Just do not micromanage and drag to endless useless meetings.
- scrumbledober 5y ago
  I have met several engineers that were very much senior to their managers but did not want to make the shift from IC to management.
- Hermitian909 5y ago
  I've known people who submitted working patches to the Linux kernel at 13, which I'd say is a reasonable start for "doing this". A 30 year old managing a 43 year old would not be strange at all.
  - dhosek 5y ago
    Exactly, I started programming in AppleSoft BASIC when I was 11, picked up 6502 Assembly and Pascal before high school and added C, Rexx. 370 assembler and FORTRAN before I started college. I was 28 the first time I had a manager younger than me. I think the last time I had a manager older than me was when I had a job where my direct report was to the CTO.
- galdosdi 5y ago
  Anecdote, but this was the approximate case on the team I worked on at Google (Manager in his mid 30s, team mostly in their 20s with one in his 50s). It happens. Actually, it was nice to see, as some evidence of non-ageism. I hope to no longer need to work by the time I'm 50, but nobody knows what the future will bring, so I'd certainly like to have the option just in case!
- imoverclocked 5y ago
  A lot. Technical managers need not be experienced technical talents who have made a potentially incompatible shift to management.
  - icedchai 5y ago
    It is better if the managers of technical people are technical themselves. Otherwise you wind up with the Dilbert "pointy-haired-boss" syndrome. The non-technical manager is extremely easy to bullshit, so it's better for the company in almost all ways.
    - ipaddr 5y ago
      An experienced manager is not easy to bullshit regardless. Sometimes a non-technical manager is better for many reasons. Having business domain experience can be just as valuable
      - lostcolony 5y ago
        I have encountered non-technical managers who were good, but in every case they would have been better still had they had some technical background. I have encountered technical managers who were not good, for various reasons. I think having a technical background is always a benefit, HOWEVER, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a good manager.
        paulcole 5y ago
        The same is true of software engineers. Every single one of them would be better if they had more of a non-technical background.
        lostcolony 5y ago
        Yep; though enough time working for companies tends to instill some knowledge and understanding of the business side of things, and as long as understanding of the business correlates with their own influence it tends to work out okay. Management is weird in that understanding of the tech side of things doesn't correlate with influence.
- Ensorceled 5y ago
  My first job out of university, I was promoted to manager in my mid 20s. One of the senior engineers reporting to me had kids older than me. Now, they were PAID a lot more than me ... The first thing they taught me was that it wasn't my job to do the work, because it didn't matter how smart I was, I didn't have almost 30 years experience.
- superfrank 5y ago
  I worked at a start up where the founders were 25 & 26 and most of their first 25 employees were their friends who were similar aged. In less than two years, there were almost 100 employees, plenty of which were in the 50s. The company's last valuation has it worth over a billion dollars now and they have a few hundred employees. A good chunk of the C suite and VPs are still those same early employees who are now in their late 20s and early 30s. Some are managing former FAANG employees in their 50s.
  - jsprogram 5y ago
    Which one was it?
- SkyPuncher 5y ago
  Not as extreme, but not far off. I believe I'm the youngest person on the team I manage. I've spent a lot of time in startups - including way too many hours in my 20's working on side-hustles (wife was in med school, so it was kind of my thing to do). I've ended up in a situation where my technical skills are strong (but not the best on my team), but my business/startup knowledge is much better so I can help to ensure everyone is working towards the most impactful/valuable outcomes.
- mbrameld 5y ago
  It's not unusual in the US military for a lieutenant or captain in their early 20s to manage many senior non-commissioned officers in their late 40s.
  - dfsegoat 5y ago
    No mil. experience myself, but I'd say that while the officers may technically 'manage' the NCO's, that with few exceptions it is the NCO's that actually get things done.
    - throwawayboise 5y ago
      Yeah the officers all move on relatively quickly; the NCOs may be on the same ship or class of ship their entire career.
- asow92 5y ago
  A few years ago, I was a "team lead" at the age of 27 managing a team that included one developer over 50 at a big TV network company. We're both at different companies nowadays, but I've been trying to get him started at my current company's team (which I am senior on, but not a lead) for a while now and he's considering it!
- smcleod 5y ago
  In a previous job I was team lead of a team that had a person in they're 40s and one in their 50s, I started as lead as a 23 year old and moved on when I was 30. There are many things I'd do differently now, but it was an effective and impactful mostly high functioning team. It does happen.
- perfect_wave 5y ago
  I'm a 25 year old managing a global team of 8 people. I'm self-conscious about my age both in my 1:1s with my reports and when talking with customers. That being said, it seems like things are going well. My team is doing great metrics and achievements wise and the company we work for tripled in size in under a year.
  - foobarian 5y ago
    You know what I usually tell my managers. "Thank you for your service" :-)
- ipaddr 5y ago
  Many organizations and it is a normal thing.
- buttercraft 5y ago
  I used to work for a company in which employees in some departments would do 2 or 3 year "shifts" as managers. When your shift was up, you went back to a regular employee in the same department, and someone you had been managing took over. It was not uncommon to have a young manager, but not everyone was eligible, obviously. I think it prevented the "us vs. them" mentality from creeping in, and I got the impression that most managers were eager to return to production work. There were dedicated managers higher up the ladder, of course.
  - grp000 5y ago
    How did that work out overall? I really like that idea, but I haven't heard of it before. People seem very motivated to stick to career tracks.
    - pjscott 5y ago
      I’m also intrigued. I’ve seen this happen several times but always de facto: someone would become a manager as an experiment, try it for a few years, and then (usually) decide to stop.
    - buttercraft 5y ago
      They're still doing exceedingly well, so it must not have hurt them. I think it takes a small but stable company to pull it off. Maybe they have stopped doing it by now, I don't know. These people cared about their work a lot, and they enjoyed doing it. Not sure which way the causation goes though... Edit to add: the rotating managers I'm referring to were doing budgets and performance reviews, not creating business strategies.
- jacobyoder 5y ago
  I'm ... late 40s. Have been paid for working on software development in some capacity for... 28 years (first paid contract was 1993), and did hobby/amateur for several years before that. I'm contracting with a couple different companies, and one of them... the others on the team range from ... 27-32. So... I've been doing professional/paid development work longer than most of them have been alive, certainly longer than any of them have been adults. The manager(s) I interact with - one just turned 31, and one is... I think 29 or 30. The older you get the more common this may become.
Ensorceled 5y ago
> Welcome to the real world, if your work is interesting, the clock might not turn on when I'm having fun. Ha! Yeah, I worked on a really cool project for a charity a few years ago: "How many hours is this going to cost us this week, you were working like a warrior?" "35"
amelius 5y ago
> If your work is bullshot, I bill tighter than my lawyer Lawyers must hate their work.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I believe it has one of the lowest job satisfaction of any white collar jobs. I've wondered that is folks didnt have the massive student loans to pay off early on if they would stick with it.
  - BurningFrog 5y ago
    Many law firms are incredibly well paid sweatshops.
  - favorited 5y ago
    Never mind when law students graduate and go to work for the government, for a salary less than a year's tuition...
    - astrange 5y ago
      Don't they get student loan forgiveness? Or just all the other kinds of benefits.
      - favorited 5y ago
        I can't speak to the general case, but I know that my brother didn't. As an ADA (living in an expensive US city) his salary is less than a first-year public school teacher with a bachelor's degree.
- skissane 5y ago
  > Lawyers must hate their work. A friend of mine is a criminal defence lawyer. I get the impression he really enjoys his work – he gets to meet a lot of people he never normally would (bikie gang members, terrorists, murderers, drug dealers, drug addicts, etc) – and he feels safe in doing so (he tells me that defendants trying to harm their own lawyers is quite rare, rare enough that he isn't worried about it). Once, at a work function (previous employer), I met one of the lawyers from the contracts department. He was telling me how he used to live in a rural area doing agricultural real estate transactions, now he had moved to the big city to do in-house contracts review for a multinational software company. He was a "top performer" (indeed, this was a function to reward people who'd been nominated as "top performers" by their management)–but he didn't give me the impression he really loved what he did, more that he was just doing it to support his family.
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
I like the cut of your jib
zomglings 5y ago
Haha I like everything you said except the "pair program" bit. From my point of view as both a programmer and an employer, this is the cleanest way to make sure knowledge transfers between short-term and long-term team members. Why the disdain? (If I interpreted correctly.)
- nine_zeros 5y ago
  Pairing is only helpful when you are new and learning from someone more experienced. However, it may be a time-sink for the more experienced person, who could be using their limited time on more critical things. That's why newbies get assigned a mentor, with whom they can pair freely. But pairing rigidly with the whole team just sucks and is incredibly unproductive.
  - zomglings 5y ago
    I don't think it's true that pairing is only helpful for new people learning from someone more experienced. But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe.
    - nine_zeros 5y ago
      > But I also think it will be difficult to convince you otherwise if that's what you believe. This is true. I have been on both sides of the pairing equation. I am currently on a team that pairs too often and I am annoyed on a daily basis because I could have been utilizing that same time for actual work. So yes, it's going to be difficult to convince me but feel free to take a stab.
      - zomglings 5y ago
        Okay, there are three other common scenarios where I have observed pairing to be immensely valuable: 1. You are in the middle of a death march and pairing with a team mate gives both of you the moral fortitude to keep going (and keep your programs relatively correct and relatively secure). 2. You are working on a tedious but difficult task and working with a team mate makes it so that you are less likely to make mistakes despite the tedium (as well as gives you the moral fortitude to continue with the task). 3. You are working on a difficult problem and you have a team mate that you can truly collaborate with to find solutions neither of you would have found on your own. (The Jeff Dean + Sanjay Ghemawat collaboration at Google is the most famous example of this.) In any of these cases, it is important to pair with someone compatible with you. And you can build compatibility over time.

zachlloyd 5y ago

i see the point here. i do think giving space for hard work is important. i still more often see the opposite problem of too much silo'd work leads to wasted effort, but for some really hard problems, having a bunch of space to think them through is beneficial.

6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago

> It also offers chance to produce memorable work as nobody remembers the set of 3 point tasks you completed ten sprints ago. This is one of the more toxic ones. To get past senior, you often need to be seen to do Big Memorable Things. It sometimes leads to perverse incentives.

belval 5y ago
I mean it's not that toxic, if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance. Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc. I think a lot of people have weaker communication skills than execution skills. So they could loop in everyone early on, but their idea might get killed off because they failed to justify it properly. If instead they leverage their execution skills and make an MVP that will speak for itself, then they bypass that issue.
- 6gvONxR4sf7o 5y ago
  Maybe toxic is the wrong word. Perverse maybe. But I don’t think that being a good worker bee often gets people past the senior level, at least from what I’ve seen. But also getting past senior is rarer, so maybe what I’ve seen isn’t representative.
- FpUser 5y ago
  >"if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance" And other than some bonus never promote you. If you have capability to be anything above that "worker bee" say / ask exactly what you want. If not look for another job. While this SCRUM / Agile bullshit is wide spread and even works in some specific circumstances there are enough companies that are not hung up on moving pins on dashboard and where one can really grow. Work for yourself. Work with the manager, not for manager.
  - belval 5y ago
    > Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc. I agree, that's exactly what I wrote.

ravenstine 5y ago

Yes, I think this is undoubtedly true. I didn't really learn until I advanced my career that, in some respects, being a junior or mid-level developer is actually better. Being a senior can be a slog, and while I got paid little in earlier positions, I actually got to do more interesting things, screw up more, and build things from scratch. The other thing that can encourage doing too much work before looping in others is the culture of the team. You are lucky if you can amass a team of people who all have the same attitude of talking to each other frequently and handling a certain level of interruption. I've worked on such teams and miss them. Although pretty much everyone at any company you work at will say "ask questions, don't hesitate, blah blah blah", there are teams where people go weeks not talking or sharing work, and everyone is always too busy to get interrupted. If work gets assigned in large chunks, as can happen for seniors in particular, it can also just not make sense to loop in someone temporarily if more time needs to be taken for the other person to catch up.

philote 5y ago

In my case, I'm the senior engineer and the rest of the team are juniors. There's generally not much I can ask them that they'd know the answer for. On the other hand, looping them in is a good learning experience for them even if they can't help me solve the issue. But due to time constraints that isn't always possible.

EGreg 5y ago
You nailed it. Senior engineers build things on their own because their company can’t afford to hire enough advanced enough people who can learn the system and take over the work without being trained for 6-12 months, and often there is no budget for this kind of ”distraction” from the core moneymaking path.

rory 5y ago

A good point, but the reason I have (and fight) this problem is much simpler: I like writing code. I dislike talking to people.

coryrc 5y ago

Or, you work at an organization which gates promotion on leading projects, so everyone has to lead things. Or your organization relies on "consensus" or "influence" to get any project done, and one of the groups (which don't share managers back to the ceo) doesn't want to do the project even though the others think it is important. So do you spend months trying to convince them while doing nothing promotion-worthy in your own?