People go to the most effective people with their problems and high-stakes projects. The reward for good work is more work.
Then one of the other people on the team, one of the lowest performers, got promoted over me and I lost it. Apparently the CIO wasn't looking at the metrics.
He made sure I got a raise and got slotted in for the next available promotion, which was only a few months away.
Then the company that was contracting us early termed their contract, and they only asked me to stay to build a new team, based on the CIO's recommendation. Metrics are a pain but they can also be a life saver.
A good manager knows the difference.
It's also possible to enjoy working for a while at an unsustainable pace, but a good manager should often tamp back on this b/c:
(a) an IC that burns themselves out and has a long recovery period of lower engagement may be less effective than an IC with sustained productivity and
(b) the swing between high and low productivity can cause issues for the team overall, esp if peers at first try to compete on pace and then have to shift to share the weight after someone burns out
There's a few usually bad options like drafting the email yourself, teaching the PM english, etc. Whatever is done, the best engineers I've seen know their job and their role, and can tell others. They balance their sense of responsibility with the reality of what they control. They price work outside of their job role, to be paid in political capital, e.g. a promotion.
If the professional does not define their role, other people will do it for them. If the professional avoids pricing, 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 performance standards.
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.