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I've been the 'fixer' in so many situations and I have a tactic for this. I ask them for the following things:

  - a ticket to track the work
  - that they get approval from my manager to drop all of the work that I am currently doing and affect other peoples timelines
  - that they document the problem and how they want it fixed
  - that they get approval for the extra hours required

You'd be amazed at how many "critical" issues disappear when you ask for these things. I personally think it is only critical because someone wants to dump the problem on you so that they can go home to their families.

I've heard the term "effort asymmetry" used for this phenomenon.

If someone can spend five minutes of their own time to create a days worth of work for you, they will do that without any hesitation. If you require them to spend fifteen minutes instead, then all of a sudden these urgent requests go away.

Wow. I’ve understood this viscerally but it’s great to be able to describe it explicitly this way.

Having been both on the sending and receiving end of this, I’m somewhat reflexively hesitant to ask others to do things for me “on a top priority” unless there’s a really good reason (most often a production outage).

I take a somewhat gentler view in that requesters may often not be aware of the effort required by you. If you’re able to communicate that, very often that’s enough for them to reconsider their ask or it’s priority.

Of course there will be a handful of jerks who always want their requests to be prioritized.

"Effort Asymmetry". That is a fantastic phrase and is so true.

I'm going to start doing this.

Not even dumping the problem. Many managers procrastinate by delegating. "I did some work on this" - No, you didn't, you just handed the hot potato to somebody dumb enough to take it.

Notice that the problem usually doesn't get solved by this. On the contrary: These managers "work" on something and the problems multiply, not get less.

Ask everybody who wants you to do work for a spec sheet. The above mentioned people can not do this.

Again what they are really doing is to appear to be working. That is the real goal. If you force them to actually do work (spec sheet), they'll disappear or deliver a hilariously bad one.

As an add-on to protecting your time. I will help just about anyone that needs help but be wary of people that send you direct slack messages.

Often they are messaging you directly because they are stuck. That is fine as we all get stuck sometimes. If they directly message you often they:

  - are lacking the skills/time/training to do their job. Been there.
  - are under pressure to get results quickly. Been there too.
  - are lacking the people/resources on their team to get results. Yup, been there too.
  - more horribly, they are taking credit for your knowledge and using you to get ahead. This has happened to me and I was pissed.

You have to break out of this cycle.

  - In your standups/scrums/reporting, make it very well known that you 'spent X hours helping Y with Z'. You do not want to get in trouble for missing deadlines because you were helping someone else. You also want to be known as a helper/fixer because those are useful to teams.
  - Move the chats from direct messages to private channels. You need to let others know what is going on and more importantly you need to spread the knowledge that you are an expert of.
  - Moving to a channel also publicly sells your skills and knowledge to a wider audience.
  - Moving to a channel lets all managers know that something is lacking somewhere. Either their team doesn't have enough training, people or docs to get the jobs done.
  - Start writing documentation or updating the current docs. There is a gap somewhere in the docs if your knowledge is directly needed. Even 2 paragraph FAQs are useful to everyone. Having a doc will save you time in the future as you can just point people to it.

Note: Always give credit where credit is due. If someone helps you out, let the world know how awesome they are. This will help you out in the long run because you will be known as someone that is humble, human and a growing.

edit: the formatting is always terrible for me

> SAY NO TO URGENT ONE-OFF REQUESTS FROM MANAGEMENT!!!

The thing is, saying no to requests from management (if it is your management of course) is going to hurt your career prospects too. Instead you should say "sure, but this thing will move the completion date of this hard and extremely important project X days, is it ok with you?" (Not having any hard and important project in the works? Fix that ASAP as the article suggests). Then ideally you reach some kind of compromise (sometimes these requests are urgent and you are the best person to handle them). If instead they say "no, I want you to do this urgent thing and complete your other projects on time, here is a nice weekend that you can use", then it is time to look for a new job.

There needs to be a process where you can feedback too, like 1-1s and have some influence over what happens. If not, you need to switch jobs. Zero influence jobs where you are directed to so X and Y but your opinion doesn’t count really really suck!

You want to be somewhere where they make sane decisions so when management says “fix this fire” it’s genuinely serious and a rare event.

There is a holistic aspect to this - other things happening in the company, the culture, the history, the industry and even the general culture of the country / city will come into play.

I know it's management's job to manage and obviously they have their own agenda but...

In the past I've seen issues that I know will blow up at some point in the near-future.

Fixing thing them would also make 3 other existing low level problems go away too.

I've explained that to management but as they don't grasp an issue yet arisen they instead let me get half way through something else "important" when the issue strikes and I have to move onto fire-fighting and working through the weekend.

From the comments that doesn't seem to be uncommon. This is the sort of stuff that "agile management" is supposed to fix but because most managers (in my experience) still think in some form of waterfall.

Rule of thumb: The more senior a manager the more they think in waterfall because that's how they see their master plan unfolding.

I know there's exceptions but there aren't enough of them.

When you say, "I've explained that to management" -- was this in writing? It works much better if you do this in writing, especially if this is a public medium you can refer to, like a JIRA ticket or a message in a public channel/mailing list. This way you at least can say, "I warned you but you refused <link to refusal message>"

If you have a PhD in the field and are spending your time prepping demos and/or generating reports, then I would say: move away from where you’re currently at. Even if you think it’s too late, chances are you still can.

This can be done by either changing how you’re being perceived internally, or, the easier way: getting a different job elsewhere.

I'm not sure how old you are but if you're planning on working for another 5-10 years, you may as well try to make it enjoyable for yourself. Perhaps you can find a way to line things up so that your manager looks their best by giving you credit. If you can frame them in a positive light, they'll want you at the presentations making it hard for others to steal credit and giving you more exposure within the org. If you feel so negatively about your manager that you can't speak highly, maybe you're at the wrong job or on the wrong team? It's a sellers market for software engineers right now so I'd encourage you to see what the market wants to offer you. Just some thoughts - I'm sure I'm missing most of the nuance of your situation.

Years ago I realized I was the only person doing software (and original electronic hardware) in a group of 10 people; in addition the larger organization I saw was mostly mechanical engineers.

I imagined the term "programmer in a corner syndrome", to describe, among other things, the realization that one had worked for years and not one person had looked at one line of your code in all that time.

(In fairness, I primarily imagined the term, not so much felt it. I was hired in the first place because they first spent O(1million) on hardware and realized no one there could make it work.)

I actually like one-off requests from management. Not all requests, I try to deflect the easy/"easy" ones, explain why the hard/"easy" are hard, take the easy/"hard" ones because it would be stupid not to and actively seek the hard/"hard" ones.

To explain why "easy" problem is hard, the best way I found is to find a precedent. Like "remember that supposedly easy project that ended up costing so much money to the company, that's what you are asking me right now, I can do it, but don't expect a different result", or "No, I can't finish it by 10pm, last time it took 3 days, it will also take 3 days this time, if you want it to be done by 10pm, find someone better than me or reduce the scope". The goal, if you get the task, is to make it clear it is harder than it looks (bonus point if it isn't).

With one-off tasks, you get to learn a lot in many fields. Being a jack of all trades is interesting too. "Interesting" work can become stale if you are doing it for too long. You may think that spending all day working on a state-of-the-art project that make inspiring YouTube videos is interesting, but it can quickly become routine. But if you are recognized as a wild card, you can get to work for some time on that fancy project, maybe just because there is a library that crashes or because they need you do whip out a quick UI, but you get to see the environment, work a bit, and see if it is as interesting as it looks, and if it is, and if you really saved their ass, you have your chance of getting in the team, especially if it really is your field of expertise.

They wont let you work on the interesting projects because they can get much more value out of you doing other work.

Write down everything you've accomplished, including the stuff others have got credit for, and also the things you got blamed for, and word it like "was responsible for" and "learned".

And be a bit "humble" about others stealing the credit, instead of "I did not get the credit I deserve", say "It was Joes idea, I just wrote the prototype, evaluated the market, launched the MVP, talked to customers, iterated on and improved the product, helped it grow to 2 million recurring monthly revenue, and helped it expand into five continents, and I trained the staff that is now working on it. But all credit goes to Joe for coming up with the idea and inspiring me to work hard, and the new staff for doing such a good job"...

Make sure everyone know what you can do. Then find another job. People will talk, and they will say - yeh he did all those things, wow.

The only way to make everyone around you change is to change to another company, with a new picture of what you can accomplish.

Yup, I call that the 'convective derivative'[0] rule: "the best way to change the people around you is to change which people are around you."

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convective_derivative

> SAY NO TO URGENT ONE-OFF REQUESTS FROM MANAGEMENT!!!

Or find new management, if this is a consistent problem.

Unless you happen to be the management hiring boss, that means finding a different place to work.

This is really easy to say, but having done pretty much exactly this for ages, finding management that doesn't take advantage of you in this regard is really rare.

what industry/country are you in?

Software engineering, have been doing it professionally for over 11 years.

I agree finding good management is a hard problem. It's also a very important one for engineers to solve.

If you don't put effort into finding management that you work well with, you probably won't find it.

The problem is that management is free to tell you all these beautiful fantasies about work culture during the hiring process. There's absolutely no way for candidates to see if it's true or not.

So in that regard, I disagree. Candidates don't need to "solve" the problem of recruiters completely misrepresenting the workplace.

Here what's worked well for me:

Always try to be a good coworker. Be helpful, friendly and competent.

If you do this well, you'll leave be 5-10 coworkers who are happy to recommend you at each job. They will also tell you the truth about culture where they work.

That's pretty much how I have done it.

BTW, one trick to learn the real culture is to ask engineers - not managers - during one on one interviews. Few engineers will lie to a potential future coworker in private.

That's not true. People lie all the time to prevent backlash against them.

I feel your pain.

On one small thing. I've started asking people where they want to be on the fast / polished scale.

I've always struggled with this. Have budget for a prototype, call is a prototype through speccingand end up with a client complaining it doesn't do everything perfectly. That's on me for not being clearer which is why I'm trialling the scale above. See how it goes!

There is a bright side to this - you're also rather important to the company. You're in effect the 1 in "bus factor 1" of several key activities that nobody else wants to do and nobody else is really qualified to do. This should allow you to put your foot down more often, refuse overtime, demand recognition for contributing to prototypes and to be given more interesting work. Your managers may not care for you, but they care for the company (unless it's one of those cash burning shops, but that's an entirely different problem). After long enough, they should even come around to the idea of hiring a junior dev under your supervision and training to take care of the more lower-level tasks.

Painful experience has taught me that the solution to this problem, being surrounded by people who don't take me seriously, is only to break out from them and leave them forever behind. Years can be taken from you by inactivity in this regard.

In my experience, as an employee (with no real skin in the game), doing the unglamorous jobs rarely gets rewarded with anything but more unglamorous work. You have to fight for your career and be willing to switch roles or jobs when you recognize when you've hit a glass ceiling. If I was told no to a project I (a) wanted to work on, (b) was qualified for, and (c) needed to be done, I would be looking for a new job. Whatever "social equity" I've given up for a new job has always been worth it.

don't volunteer for the one-off quickies, either.

they'll keep coming to you.