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Re:The hero tax: Why 'selfless' workers are professionally e... by chambers on Monday April 15, 2024 @07:19PM (#40046754)
I've lived this dynamic as a manager. I've come to see it as a problem of "ownership". When competent people try to be responsible & knowledgeable with a piece of work but lack control or a mandate for that piece of work to be done well. Think "engineers are ready to launch a new feature but the PM struggles with written English; they can't draft an email." What does one do?

Draft it yourself, try to train the PM, say "no" and tell them it's not your responsibility, do only a part of the editing, or become a PM and "own" the email. In all cases, I think the effective professionals I've observed either redefine the work to require less control or they set a price for "above-and-beyond" service, to be paid in political capital.

If the professional avoids pricing, then they're saying their time is free. That person get marked as a patsy or a cog. Someone who messes can be dumped on and who, thanks to corporate Pavlovian conditioning, gets work done without upsetting the status quo. The more messy the work is, the less control you have, the more time you personally need to sacrifice. It's a recipe for burn out, role confusion, and other people's ideals becoming your own performance standards.

Re:The hero tax: Why 'selfless' workers are professionally e... by ore0s on Monday April 15, 2024 @09:55PM (#40047657)
This speaks a lot to me. If an integration was new, or I'd never managed resources before, or worked cross-org in any way, I'd just pick it up. I'd even do the PM's job of interviewing the customers, validating if we were targeting real painpoints, and attempting to drive product direction.

Over a few years I worked on several projects, which all became the company's product suite. They all gained adoption, became very valuable and were sold to several customers, but they were not reliable. Even less so after they moved me off. But they were solving real problems, and customers were still happy, and so the company still kept them alive with bigger teams.

The company attained unicorn status, but I never really got ownership of any 1 project or product. I'd get increasing requests for help across the growing product suite, was able to help effectively, and simultaneously took on new feature development work.

In the latter part of my time there, I found out I may have been in the bottom quartile of pay for the team I was in, while being perceived as the top performer by coworkers.

I was in a slow 'burn out' but never fully checked out. Maybe because I think I rarely put in over 50 hours a week. Never touched comms during weekends.