Certainly situational but I will share some of my experience and it regards the concept of "Seniority" of an engineer. When having a goal --> Multi-tasking can be bad In most cases, you will be tasked with something specific that you need to complete. As humans, are brains are drawn to distractions like bees to honey. What happens then is you deviate from you single goal of the day/week/month and the actual output you have is effectively decreased. That also goes for the quality of your work. As a Senior --> Multi-tasking is probably required Seniority as I have experienced it being the most effective, except for the excellent technical competency, entails the concept of "being able to enable" as many people as possible. Either that be: Solving an issue between Dev & QA Getting new ideas into the table ( Technical or Product-oriented ) Enabling Marketing doing their job X times faster by teaching/showing them some automation capabilities etc. Times and times again this might come into people as "Imposter Syndrome", because they are successful in their job, by just being there, enabling and giving their technical edge. Nothing more, which is great!
