Did the company ever use the "internal market" paradigm? If so, keep track of your time spent on other-peoples-problems and record it in a spreadsheet, and invoice other peoples' managers accordingly :)
...and get shit done. I mean come on, who asks a person in another team to help with a regular expression. There has to be a line somewhere. You can be a go-to person for an obscure technology, some complex framework, but being a go-to person for regular expressions? What's next? Go-to person for iteration?
When I joined it was about 15 employees. When I left it was about 150 (but still under 30 devs) so this wouldn't really be reasonable.
But part of the problem was they did know simple enough regex for what they wanted to accomplish. Having a few simple regex and some application logic around them would have done it. But they'd often think "that sounds messy, squeaky-clean can probably solve this in a single regex." And while I probably could, it would not be good code nor would it be more performant.
How are you supposed to get work done on a team, if any question asked to another team member is immediately seen as "unproductive"? It's not just about regexes. I'm having trouble debugging a system, who do I ask? Nobody, apparently, because if I do then I might incur a "bill" from my own coworkers!
You wouldn't be logging time spent on stuff that's part of your actual responsibilities and/or for your same team (under the same manager) is fine - the whole "internal market" stuff applies to inter-team work, especially work/asks/tasks that don't go through the chain-of-command (i.e. from IC1 in team A to IC2 in team B without going through either Team A's manager nor Team B's manager).
I think in the some cases like people mentioned above, it's no longer collaboration but more of a consultation. The benefit is only going in one direction: to the consultantee. In that case, you need some way to make the nature of that relationship explicit and valued. Otherwise these consultants begin to feel they're being put in a position of working for someone else without management recognizing that and compensating it as such.
When I joined it was still a pretty early stage startup so that wouldn't have been reasonable. When I left it was pretty solidly in the mid-sized company category, so maybe something like that would have been doable (invoices are pretty rude though). I did enjoy helping cross-team though, it's fun working with people you don't work with on a daily basis, and they were/are my friends.
I wouldn't even have minded being seen as the "string pattern/parsing guy". But I was specifically regex-guy in their minds.
Also story for another day and another thread, I was also the MongoDB-guy. Similar to the regex stuff though, in 90% of the questions they'd send to me MongoDB was not the correct choice.
Overall it's more nuanced then could ever fit into an HN comment (yes I brought it up with management, and other issues), but there are a number of reasons I quit. I quit a couple months before a company buyout we knew was going to happen and I had equity. I felt like it was probably the right choice then. I recently got some beers with some of my friends who stayed through the buyout and had equal amounts of equity and learned I did make the correct choice.
