> "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 alternativ…
> 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.
This can mean a ton of things, which cannot all be served by a single senior+ engineer:
* mentorship
* seeking out, establishing, and evangelizing best practices, and not just coding best practices: architecture, documentation, testing, ci/cd etc
* high-level architecture knowledge and experience
* evaluating technology choices: tooling, databases, orchestration platforms, etc etc
* assisting management and product with scoping and prioritizing work
* the ability to put your head down and crank out a solution to something in code simply because it needs done and you can do it better and/or faster than others
* laying the framework of a greenfield project, maybe sketching out the codebase or POC for juniors to take and run with
* ...and so on and so forth.
A single person may be able to contribute all these things to a team over a time frame of multiple years, but in a 3 or 6 month time frame, most mortal engineers could only contribute two or three.