I'm going to tell you about an engineer I worked with. Call him Mark. Mark was talented, well-liked, and utterly ineffective. Here's what I learned from watching him.
What Mark did
Mark's technical skills were real. He wrote good code. He gave thoughtful design review comments. He spoke well in meetings.
Mark's problem: he didn't own anything.
He worked on whatever was in front of him. He fixed bugs in code he didn't write. He helped other engineers with their services. He never said 'this is mine.' Everything was 'we should figure out who handles that.'
