This is pretty succinct. It's so easy to get bogged down answering questions that people can find themselves, helping with random shit, getting a pointless ad hoc report together so you know what you're talking about in an email.
Honestly I spend so little time doing my actual job because of this extraneous shit I need to focus more.
Happened to me. I was passed over for a promotion to a position I was already filling in for years ago. So I stopped being helpful. I found another job. During my exit interview I was told that if I had been doing what I did during my last two weeks I would have gotten the position months before. It wasn't the only reason I left, but it was definitely the straw that broke the camel's back.
But once I left they gave the position to someone who, like me, had institutional knowledge and was disgruntled about a lot of things happening. But that person had no managerial training or experience so they ended up bleeding all their techs because he kept making bad decisions.
I think they got scared he would leave too. And he did. A year later and they only had one employee below the director who had been there longer than a few months. All that at least partly because no one would look at me and tell me to chill the fuck out and just do the job rather than doing all the jobs. They sure liked me doing all the jobs when I was just another guy in the bullpen.
Congrats Dutchman. You have won the rare " good boss". The boss is aware of your drop in productivity, and is assuming you need a vacation or something, but you are just doing less work instead. He sees that as a good thing.
I managed to complete Starfield during my work hours with no complaints. It's nice reaching the point in a job where you figure out how much you're actually expected to do.
Dev/SysOps, because if you build shit that doesn't collapse then you can spend time experimenting with improvements instead of babysitting application clusters.
I feel this! I've been working with American style startups for almost a decade and now recently moved to a Dutch scale-up. They made me take a month long vacation, telling me to do less, delegate more — and now they're giving me a pretty substantial raise?? My American brain cannot comprehend what's happening, I feel like I've been conditioned to take abuse and I'm having trouble accepting their compassion.