When joining a new team, a common piece of advice is to “gain credibility” by doing undesirable tasks others don’t want to do. The problem with proof-of-worth is that, after a certain point, it has the opposite effect—proving no worth. Being in the habit of doing proof-of-worth tasks takes away the time needed to do high leverage work that no one else can which is likely the primary responsibility of the role anyway.
Read the Twitter thread from Shreyas Doshi.
See also:
- Resolving bugs is proof-of-worth but resolving strategy bugs isn’t
- The smart programmer fallacy contributes to this issue if you outsource your thinking to others