I think it's management and their "agile" philosophy that's toxic here, intentionally depriving engineers of any sense of ownership, autonomy, or vision-fulfillment over their work by constantly bouncing them around across small disjoint tasks.

I am incredibly fortunate to work in a place that values ownership, both explicitly and in practice. Given how widespread the opposing value system is, I'm afraid to ever leave.

because programmers must be replaceable parts for the industry to keep going at status quo

We have plenty of turnover and it works out fine. In fact turnover of the senior engineers who are service/project owners usually creates the opening for one of the more junior contributors to demonstrate L+1 competency by taking over.

“the status quo is fine”

Of course the status quo is fine, you're one of the highest paid people in one of the cushiest occupations in all of human history.

To me moving beyond senior means you enable the entire team to contribute together accomplish Big Memorable Things.

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.

If every senior only does internal assistant work, which senior does actual building of complex services?

What is more important? Building better services or being a library writer?

Every point you describe is exactly perverse incentives.

"Write great code to build stuff" is still a core part of the job.

But it doesn't really enable anyone else on the team, other than providing a model of well-structured code to follow - and most people's code is really not as great as they think it is.

I'd rather have a team of average coders who do things to enable and better each other and the team over a team reliant on a great coder or two who can't or refuses to enable anyone else.

I mean it's not that toxic, if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance. Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc.

I think a lot of people have weaker communication skills than execution skills. So they could loop in everyone early on, but their idea might get killed off because they failed to justify it properly. If instead they leverage their execution skills and make an MVP that will speak for itself, then they bypass that issue.

> If instead they leverage their execution skills and make an MVP that will speak for itself, then they bypass that issue.

Hell yes. Forgiveness beats permission every single time.

>"if you are a good worker bee your manager will usually notice and be happy with your performance"

And other than some bonus never promote you. If you have capability to be anything above that "worker bee" say / ask exactly what you want. If not look for another job. While this SCRUM / Agile bullshit is wide spread and even works in some specific circumstances there are enough companies that are not hung up on moving pins on dashboard and where one can really grow.

Work for yourself. Work with the manager, not for manager.

> Then from time-to-time you branch off to do something more high-risk to add to your promo doc.

I agree, that's exactly what I wrote.

Maybe toxic is the wrong word. Perverse maybe. But I don’t think that being a good worker bee often gets people past the senior level, at least from what I’ve seen. But also getting past senior is rarer, so maybe what I’ve seen isn’t representative.

Exeactly. There is too much emphasis put on rewarding those who make big, disruptive change and large, solo wins. Someone making a lot of little wins are just as valuable yet usually don't any great accolates for it. Not to mention, putting one person on a large-ish project is a great way to create silos.

It is not even toxic. Modern development is cooperative to absurd level all too often. You don't have any ability to make independent decisions or autonomy pretty much any time. Literally everything is result of negotiation and compromise and what not.

Taking chance to do a bit of focused work and actually do it in that environment is not toxic. It is not like you have run of for months and refused to communicate. It is just ... getting slight bit of rest.