Many years ago, I worked at a company with a product that ran on Mac and Windows. The Mac version was pretty solid, but the Windows version had some problems.

They had a talented team of developers who were mostly Mac experts and just starting to get a grip on Windows.

I was known at the time as a "Windows expert", so they hired me to help the team get the Windows version into shape.

My typical day started with "house calls". People would ping me with their Windows questions and I'd go door to door to help solve them - and to make sure they understood how to do things on Windows.

In the afternoon, I would work on my own code, but I told everyone they could always call on me for help with a Windows problem, any time of day.

One colleague asked me: "Mike, how can you afford to be so generous with your time?"

Then in a performance review, I got this feedback:

"Mike, we're worried. Your productivity has been OK lately, but not great. And it's surprising, because the productivity of the rest of the team has improved a lot during this time."

I bit my tongue, but in retrospect I should have said:

"Isn't that what you hired me for?"

Reminds me of this post: https://dannorth.net/blog/the-worst-programmer/

Discussed here a couple of times as well: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37361947 , https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43452649

I got an HR meeting a couple of years back where they selected me to be laid off because I wasn't closing as many tickets off as the rest of the team. Every single ticket had been through another engineer first and they had failed to resolve it.

I was absolutely fine with this and didn't defend it because the enhanced payment I was going to get was huge. But alas they worked it out in the end and here I am fixing arcane shit still that no one else has a clue about or is defeated by.

Great story, and I feel it! A lot of companies, when they hire a senior person, say they want you to be a "force multiplier" but when you actually go and multiply your team's force, they turn around and say "bbbbuut, wait--your individual performance...."

Sounds like the person doing the performance review just relies on metrics. Sounds like a shitty leader.

The #1 skill good devs need to develop is self-marketing. Would that all managers could recognize talent by output alone but alas we all know that's not the case.

It is sad when the people who are in charge can't recognize such an important role. I'm so sorry this happened to you, and if you can, keep mentoring. At a time when juniors are struggling more than in the past you could be the one to really help.

I always wonder how productivity is measured