I once had a rather prestigious developer position in a Silicon Valley company. The "approachability" was a double edged sword.
One problem I fought was that a lot of people expected handholding from me, or wanted me in their meeting to "feel important." There really is value to having your manager act as a gatekeeper.
Another problem I had was that less ambitious people in other departments (support, qa,) would throw their work over the wall to me. I eventually had to get involved with triage to train the other managers to push back on this.
I can relate to this. One way to look at this is that dev-team is where majority of IP is created and not in teams like support/qa/docs/PMs. Over the period of time, they are also the reservoir of domain knowledge.
This often results into nuisances like:
1. Instead of reading product docs people will ask questions directly over slack (e.g Do we support Windows 2008? Do we have feature X?)
2. Adding dev team in a slack channels in which sales can directly ask questions which ideally should be answered by Product Managers.
yes! I'm more junior than you are, but once I got a rep as a gung ho problem solver, I started getting approached by random sales associates asking me to implement features. I would usually do it out of love for the business, even if it meant I was staying up until 2am hacking shit together. But then I burned out. My quality of life improved significantly when I started being strict about people communicating with me only through my manager or product manager.
Yeah, but if you are like me someone who always wanted to get out of software completely, this would have been a god send. But over here in the UK I've never been at a company that has allowed me to even have a sniff of the business side. And I'm nearly 20 years into an IT career spanning 8 different companies.
As an outsider observer I always get the feeling companies in the UK are particularly guilty of viewing developers as a resource which merely produces code and which should be kept separate from the business. Not sure why that is but I feel like I read something to that effect every month.
> would throw their work over the wall to me
For myself as QA, I would see the throwing the opposite direction. Devs started having me close out unit tests, giving incomplete work hoping I find their issues, gathering requirements to know what to test etc.
The requirements should be coming from elsewhere and hopefully you are involved at the start of the project.
Hopefully you should be catching all issues regardless and the increase catches look good to your matrix.
One problem I fought was that a lot of people expected handholding from me, or wanted me in their meeting to "feel important." There really is value to having your manager act as a gatekeeper.
Another problem I had was that less ambitious people in other departments (support, qa,) would throw their work over the wall to me. I eventually had to get involved with triage to train the other managers to push back on this.