I certainly sympathise. In a strong culture, when you mentored someone, their achievements and success would reflect on you. The boss would see your cohort doing well, and give you a pay rise for your fantastically valuable contribution to the company. "Thank you, maxxxxx, for making these junior software engineers 50% more effective," the boss would say. "Why, you've had the same effect as hiring two or three more people!"

But if your culture involves ranking and paying people only relative to each other, I can understand the need to protect yourself. And everybody loses :( The company loses, you lose, the potential mentees lose :(

Another factor is that by mentoring my own output goes down a lot. If I get interrupted several times a day to help then I get nothing done on my own stuff. I think on overall it's still a big gain for the team but I look worse.

That calls for setting clear boundaries, and proactively checking in/interrupting your mentee when it's a good time for you to take a break.

I like metrics based on how much time the other person has and expects to waste not being able to do anything productive, which strongly suggests you should give him at least two things he can be doing, an obvious second one being reading documentation or otherwise researching necessary stuff he doesn't yet know. After a certain number of hours it's worth an interruption.

And there's the reverse effect that teaching someone else forces you to better learn the subject, so you should gain some extra productivity from this.

If the saying "A rising tide lifts all boats" doesn't hold in your company, I'd say that's definitely a dysfunction.

Isn't that pretty common? "A rising tide lifts only the boats of a privileged few"?

> almost get no credit

Delivered four senior developers in order to accelerate our team's velocity...

that's what my resume says.

I never even considered that. Thank you. I'm going to have to remember to add more "soft skills" and accomplishments to my resume.

Anything you do at work that is not a regular part of your job is on your resume. If you get called out on it being bullshit, then you remove it.

> that's what my resume says.

Which implies it was only valuable to future companies you worked for. Those that actually believe in mentoring, which seems to be rare based on what others are saying and my own experiences.

Um, no, it doesn't imply that at all. The current company values it; he also figured out how to explain it to a future company.