[1091298301]

Leave them alone? I've always worked in "teams" where 1-3 workhorses made everything happen; the rest was talking, spinning intrigues and inventing new workflow procedures (which slowed down and annoyed the workhorses).

[jknoepfler]

Not a sustainable model, or a formula for growth. If you genuinely think this fire your time wasters and raise your hiring bar.

If you don't invest a piece of your work week mentoring juniors, you're a lot less productive than you could be.

[candiodari]

Have you ever seen a product manager or "the meeting guy" train juniors ? That doesn't even make sense, as you haven't hired those juniors to do either product management or "stakeholder management" or ... whatever the next fashionable term will be, so they simply can't provide the training that is needed.

At least where I work, the "workhorses" are the ones training the new guys.

[aries1980]

Not every problem has to be solved in team fashion and not every member of an organisation has to fit in a hiring pattern. Also there are “brilliant jerks” or people with out-of-fashion worldview. These people could have their place in an organisation. Clearly this is a leadership challenge, but hey, leaders should learn hard and be great as much as their engineers.

[jasonpeacock]

Those "workhorses" negatively contribute to your bus factor[1], they're a risk that needs to be eliminated.

That doesn't mean you have to eliminate the workhorses, but you need to convert them from being 10x engineers to being 10x multipliers.

This is the valuable and essential element of personal growth that I'm espousing - teach yourself how to multiply the team's output.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_factor

[Bahamut]

That effectively has happened at me at work - I volunteered to become a lead engineer, and have been thrust mostly into management. It has been a very enlightening experience, as I no longer am solving the difficult technical problems on a day to day basis (I maybe will solve one abnormally difficult problem every week), but I am now judged on the productivity of my team - I dropped my coding to near zero and focused on the soft skills & using my technical ability to help craft approaches for my team members to get to a more consistent level of productivity.

While my outsized code productivity was decreased to near zero, my team is moving faster, which benefits the company over the long term, as well as me being able to gain the skill s needed to help mentor people in concrete fashion to become better engineers.

[nvarsj]

> That doesn't mean you have to eliminate the workhorses, but you need to convert them from being 10x engineers to being 10x multipliers

By stopping them from producing things of value? How does this make any sense. It's the peter principle all over again.