A friend told me about someone at their company who got caught using ChatGPT to answer client questions during a live meeting - copying the questions in, reading the responses back, right there in front of the client. They'd been in the role long enough that nobody had been checking their work too closely.
I watched a newer team member spend most of their first few months entering data into a tracking system. Not because it was a learning exercise, not because it helped them understand the domain, but because the senior they were supporting didn't want to do it themselves.
My director said something offhand on a call recently that stuck with me: promotions codify what's already been happening. By the time someone gets promoted, they've already been doing the work of that next level, and the title is just catching up.
I was reading a post on Hacker News - a list of rules for being a new manager. Good rules. But some of them really are rules for new managers. I've been watching Gotham Chess's "slow-run" series, and it gets at this.
I was on a team that put junior developers into the on-call rotation earlier than we should have. The reasoning made sense on paper - they needed to learn the system, and the senior engineers were stretched thin.
I wrote a while back about framing problems with proposed solutions - the idea that "this is broken and here's what I think we could try" lands better than "this is broken" on its own. I still think that's mostly right.
Nobody enjoys being on the receiving end of bad news. That part is obvious. What's less obvious is how much worse bad news gets when the person delivering it optimizes for their own comfort instead of yours.