I ran into this problem after a promotion and some company growth left me over a much larger footprint of our engineering department than I was used to. I ended up making a couple rules for myself and establishing a couple new routines, which all have helped:
“Handbooking” - this is something I learned from reading about Gitlab and ended up adopting for my department. If it’s important, it goes into the handbook. If it’s not, then I probably don’t need to know it anyway. This alone took a lot of burden off me (people only ping me now if something is missing from the handbook or if they didn’t understand it, both of which are signals that the handbook needs work).
Office hours - I don’t do this consistently, but when I feel like the interruptions are still too frequent I’ll just post some office ours in our dev channel and tell people they can bother me in a few 2-hour blocks that week. Otherwise I sit there and livestream whatever work it is that I’m doing for whomever is interested in that sort of thing.
Trusting - I found much of my increased stress was a lack of faith in others to do a passable job of things, so I’d burden myself with them. In a lot of cases things went as badly as I expected by letting go, but my personal stress was reduced nonetheless.
Thanks for the tips. I tried live streaming work a few times. I think it can work as long as people don't ask questions too much, but I feel a bit too egotistical to do it. It doesn't feel great.
Yeah, I feel that. Usually I have like a 2 hour coding block planned with something new/interesting, so it would end up being more of a workshop, like e.g. here’s how to build a really quick cron job for our k8s cluster or whatever. I tend to keep an eye out for little ~2 hour tasks that would be interesting and just save them for those blocks.
Aside from that, ego is a lot more about attitude than action. If you remain inquisitive/curious/accepting/etc. then you won’t be seen as cocky.
Also, just a reminder if you’re in an advanced position then showing off your coding skills is less about ego and more about helping. I had a boss early on point out to me (much to my surprise) that the programmers sitting around me were drowning trying to put together even simple solutions to their problems, and I had the ability to save them hours with just a few minutes of attention. Obviously you can only take that so far, but it gave me a lot of confidence to know I could help folks out.
“Handbooking” - this is something I learned from reading about Gitlab and ended up adopting for my department. If it’s important, it goes into the handbook. If it’s not, then I probably don’t need to know it anyway. This alone took a lot of burden off me (people only ping me now if something is missing from the handbook or if they didn’t understand it, both of which are signals that the handbook needs work).
Office hours - I don’t do this consistently, but when I feel like the interruptions are still too frequent I’ll just post some office ours in our dev channel and tell people they can bother me in a few 2-hour blocks that week. Otherwise I sit there and livestream whatever work it is that I’m doing for whomever is interested in that sort of thing.
Trusting - I found much of my increased stress was a lack of faith in others to do a passable job of things, so I’d burden myself with them. In a lot of cases things went as badly as I expected by letting go, but my personal stress was reduced nonetheless.