[Consultant32452]

I have landed on the phrases rising tide vs shooting star. Early in my career I wanted to be the shooting star, the bestest most productive person there. Now that I'm older I want to be a rising tide that raises all ships. Did you experience a similar transition, or were you always a rising tide type?

[photonios]

Yeap. I was the most productive in the room and it was becoming a problem. Others simply couldn't keep up and it was slowing us down on the long run rather than making it go faster and better. I was disappointed with the improvements others in my team were making and started wondering what I could do to make that go better.

I realised that one of the freedoms I had early in the career was the freedom to experiment and fail. This taught me a lot and turned me into the software engineer I am today. I realised was robbing them of that valuable experience. I am more ok now with letting them pick a sub-optimal solution, as long as it doesn't directly affect the business.

I like the term. I am going note that down. Thanks!

[Consultant32452]

Apologies, this kind of became a novella.

>Yeap. I was the most productive in the room and it was becoming a problem. Others simply couldn't keep up and it was slowing us down on the long run rather than making it go faster and better.

It was a problem for me too, but in a different way. I feel like I was resented by my teammates for being a shooting star. I was younger then so there's a strong possibility I was hot-dogging it a bit unintentionally. I was definitely getting first pick at all the coolest projects, which of course I enjoyed.

I'm not entirely confident that more is being accomplished now that I'm a rising tide. Statistically I think there's some evidence that isn't the case. For example, there's Price's Law which states that half the productivity is completed by the square root of the people in the domain. The following is really rough math just to put some plausible numbers on it... So if there's 9 people on the team, I was one of the 3 people doing half the work, and the other 6 did the other half of the work. That means I was individually accomplishing 16.6% of the work, and the 6 were each accomplishing 8%. If by being a rising tide my individual productivity is cut in half, then the other 6 people have to improve their individual productivity by nearly 3% of the total work, or 35% over what they were doing before. I have no confidence that the other people have improved their productivity by 35%. If I could reliably improve worker productivity by 35%+ I'd be a lot wealthier. However, I do believe people enjoy working with me more, and consequently I have a better experience at work.