This is pretty succinct. It’s so easy to get bogged down answering questions that people can find themselves, helping with random shit, getting a pointless ad hoc report together so you know what you’re talking about in an email.

Honestly I spend so little time doing my actual job because of this extraneous shit I need to focus more.

Happened to me. I was passed over for a promotion to a position I was already filling in for years ago. So I stopped being helpful. I found another job. During my exit interview I was told that if I had been doing what I did during my last two weeks I would have gotten the position months before. It wasn’t the only reason I left, but it was definitely the straw that broke the camel’s back.

But once I left they gave the position to someone who, like me, had institutional knowledge and was disgruntled about a lot of things happening. But that person had no managerial training or experience so they ended up bleeding all their techs because he kept making bad decisions.

I think they got scared he would leave too. And he did. A year later and they only had one employee below the director who had been there longer than a few months. All that at least partly because no one would look at me and tell me to chill the fuck out and just do the job rather than doing all the jobs. They sure liked me doing all the jobs when I was just another guy in the bullpen.