Re:Ask HN: How do you become productive in a new project as ...
by JackFr on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @12:48PM
(#14402809)
I think the parent was the lead taking the onus off his direct reports. In such a case, improving your team morale and productivity is more important than closing out a couple of 1 point stories.
On the other hand, if the team were peers in the org chart, I agree with you.
If you become a waterboy, you will definitely be appreciated by the team, productivity & morale will go up etc - But you personally didn't sign up to be a waterboy! You came to be a player. So play.
You can't go from being a standup-summarizer or infra-support-guy to your regular senior developer role. If you are any good at those ancillary roles, you will be playing those roles for a long time. Every day doing infra is a day not doing regular dev - that's just the way it is. I have been there & its not fun. These ancillary roles have a way or morphing into a fulltime job, and soon that's what you'll end up doing.
This isn't WMA/CAA where you start in the mailroom and few years later you become Hollywood's top producer greenlighting 100 million $ movies. It simply doesn't work like this in tech companies.