What's your advice to someone who lives this dynamic? I've experienced it, and felt it slowed down my career trajectory. I want to make a change in my story and will try my best to listen.
I've lived this dynamic as a manager. I've come to see it as a problem of "ownership" which obscures a larger problem of role confusion. When competent people try to be responsible & knowledgeable with work but lack control for that work to be done well. Think "engineers are ready to launch a new feature but the PM struggles with written English and can't draft an email." What do you do as an engineer?
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.
This speaks a lot to me. If an integration was new, or I'd never managed resources before, or worked cross-org in any way, I'd just pick it up. I'd even do the PM's job of interviewing the customers, validating if we were targeting real painpoints, and attempting to drive product direction.
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.
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.