"When I was an engineer I focused on work that improved my career, but then I became a manager and realized that my engineers actually should work to improve my career!"
Funny how that works.
Funny how that works.
Fact of the matter is that there are a whole lot of people that aren’t necessarily into that, but are great individual contributors, and should just be left to their devices as long as they’re a positive contribution, not just to your codebase, but towards your organisation as a whole.
Edit: Notice I'm not saying this is bad, this is just natural bias towards what benefits yourself. It is just so interesting to see how people who experience that bias shift now sees it as some kind of "insight" rather than just their own bias.
If you act in the interests of the business, the leadership of a company will (usually, but not always) reward you for your service to the business. Whether or not this is something you "should" do is up to you, in my opinion. As an IC, you can't make me care about a business. I'm there to get paid and gain career experience, the latter of which sometimes improves the business and sometimes not.