Collaboration among teammates is a natural and expected part of the development process. Over helping happens when one developer spends large amounts of time helping another developer get their work done, and less time focusing on their own work.
Over helping can be normal on small project-based teams or when experienced engineers help new recruits. But when an engineer spends over half their time on someone else’s projects, they can’t get their own work done.
This behavior can be perfectly healthy and expected when in a mentorship situation. But beyond a certain point, rotation is in order.
Over Helping Can Lead To:
- The over helper not focusing on completing their own assignments
- Over reliance from other engineers
- Preventing the original author from gaining confidence and mastery
- Burnout in the helper that leaves the original author waiting for that help or not getting the help they were expecting
How to Recognize Over Helping
- Review Collaboration: Recurring, last-minute corrections between the same two people.
- Project Timeline: High amount of help others often not reciprocated by other team members.
- Team Health Insights: One engineer will have a high impact, the other won’t.
What to Do
See what’s causing the over helping by having a conversation with each engineer:
- Mentoring: Senior engineers may be helping out more junior engineers as part of onboarding or cross training. Give them a deadline for wrapping up the over helping pattern and encourage them to work with other engineers in the following review. Bringing in additional engineers into the code review process strengthens the team’s overall knowledge of the codebase.
- Limited understanding: Cross-train and assign both engineers to different areas of the codebase since over helping may be a result of unfamiliarity with specific parts of code.
- Friendship: You want this! Help them to get a variety of perspectives and learn from talent across the team.
- Leaders in the making: The over helper pattern may reveal a natural leader on your team. If you notice the over helper has leadership and coaching tendencies, give them opportunities to lead more broadly on the team.
- Stuck in their own work: Sometimes when engineers are stuck or blocked, they may turn their focus on over helping others. If this is the case, find out what’s blocking them or how you can better support them and balance their attention.
- Author
Patryk Nowak
Backend developer
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