I have been that guy, unfortunately nobody stepped in to prevent me from being thrown under the bus, and it ended up with me departing a company where I otherwi

I have been that guy, unfortunately nobody stepped in to prevent me from being thrown under the bus, and it ended up with me departing a company where I otherwise loved the people I worked with. It ultimately ended up being one of the driving factors of some burn out, that in working through made me leave engineering altogether for a different role. This can happen especially in startups, because you're always resource constrained, growing faster than you can handle (you hope), and everyone wears multiple hats. That is all fine, generally, it only becomes a problem when you never (after several cycles of hiring) get help to remove some hats and/or you end up being held responsible for failures outside your control due to that situation. Now in a different role, I make it a point to try to identify teams that are overloaded, shield them from unfair expectations, and advocate for additional resourcing. If you bother looking, it's generally pretty obvious, but most managers are focused on managing up, not managing down, so ICs at the bottom are ignored unless they're a source of waves that come back through management onto their chain.