This overall thread is interesting because it keeps bouncing back and forth, almost literally, between it being managers or engineers who like to work on things

This overall thread is interesting because it keeps bouncing back and forth, almost literally, between it being managers or engineers who like to work on things unimportant. As an engineer who has never managed outside of interns, I find both can be equally damaging. Although, an engineer pre-accustomed to in the weeds work who has no management guiding what to work on can be the worse because they can create work for the other engineers that can have zero motivating context, other than they think it’s what needs to be done. And they will report to management all these technical details that somehow appear to bolster the need but don’t actually. I am no fan of management, but working with these types of engineers can be infuriating because you end up getting sucked into their random deep dive that is messy and full of edge cases that ultimately matters zilch. I will pretty actively communicate to management that, look, if you don’t step in we’ll be following this engineer to the ends of the earth. An example I can think of is one engineer being obsessed with making a once a year report being as optimized and performant as possible, while also being obsessed with “cleaning up” the data and fixing so-called discrepancies at the report level, making little hot fix patches everywhere, rather than working with the teams that were generating the supposedly bad data in the first place. I did everything I could to avoid working on that because it was nothing but being mired in details and things that literally no one but them cared about. These types of engineers can be black holes of productivity.