I think this makes sense especially for smaller companies, but it does put a extra emphasis on hiring well. Basically, I'm expected to code and helping my team is secondary to that. If I want the team to succeed I need to hire people who are self motivated and competent enough that they only require a little guidance here and there.

Turns out that's very difficult to hire consistently for. Finding self motivated and highly skilled developers just isn't all that easy in todays climate of boot campers.

There’s an article that was going around again about ‘glue work’ ([1]) that has a story where an engineer gets caught up doing all this kind of mentoring, coordination and other work like that and then is passed over for promotions because they don’t have technical achievements (though they claim to have become instrumental in enabling everyone else’s technical achievements).

The article never gets to quite the right conclusion - it’s actually massive management failure - what I was thinking the whole way through was “why hasn’t somebody sat them down and told them to do their actual job??”

Mentoring and code review are both super important, but if the organisation wants you to focus on getting tickets done then you basically just have to, unless you can convince them to actually add the additional work to your actual role description or get enough seniority to add it yourself.

But it’s good to have feedback on what kind of work you’re actually going to be measured on in performance reviews, promotions etc.

1. https://noidea.dog/glue