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by erikerikson
1931 days ago
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There's another perspective to take on this. This sort of behavior you are describing locks you further and further into the role you are in right now, reducing the rate of which you grow and learn. It sets up by dynamic where the company is incentivized to keep you there. Another possibility is that you make yourself entirely removable or even just solve the problem so well that it no longer needs headcount. Instead of seeing people reaching out to you as satisfying a "I feel needed" emotion, you can see the need to have been reached out to as a tax that reduces the value you create. Businesses really like developers who reduce replacement costs, solve their problems, and enable others. They tend to put them on increasingly valuable and interesting problems. |
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* They're not very good developers and not very smart and probably somewhat cognizant of that.
* They're afraid of interviewing.
* They're working in smaller markets (e.g. a town which has maybe just one or two companies that hire developers).
* They're spending right up against their income or beyond it and are afraid of losing their job.
If they hit all of these checkboxes then I reckon this behavior is almost guaranteed and getting potentially "redundancy inducing information" out of them will be like pulling teeth. They'll be busy a lot. Far too busy to talk to you. Their docs likely won't be nonexistent (too obvious), but they will probably be deliberately obtuse.
They're primarily concerned not with learning but with not losing their primary source of income and their time horizon shortens, much like it does for those stuck in a behavioral poverty trap https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03043...
Yes, this sort of behavior locks you further and further into the role you are in and is possibly self defeating, but it's entirely natural and fairly common.