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At most companies I've worked for, mentoring and training junior engineers is a requirement for promotion. Also, you might not get promoted for maintenance but

1. keeping it running with a healthy userbase and demonstrating high impact does, and

2. if you know how to spin it, then maintenance work can look like "building new stuff".

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> At most companies I've worked for, mentoring and training junior engineers is a requirement for promotion.

You've worked for some great orgs, then! My experience is mostly the opposite. One company I worked for did value mentorship, at least somewhat, and it was a factor in promotion decisions, but not mentoring others didn't really stop people from getting promoted.

I think this is more of a "do what I say, and not what I do" thing. Nominally most companies want you to mentor junior devs, but the worker who spends less time on that, and more time on higher visibility work gets the promotion priority.

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