lol. No. NoooooooOOOoooo. No. Absolutely not.

If you start doing somebody else’s job to take up the slack it becomes your job. Nobody thinks of it as you doing extra, and if it doesn’t get done you’ve become the de facto person in charge of the task and will be blamed.

You have to set boundaries. If your job relies on somebody else doing their job and it isn’t getting done you sit tight.

Hard disagree. It is their job, amd while not doing their job could affect me, that does not make it my job.

If I will get grief because them not doing their job holds me up, then I blame them without any hesitation, because otherwise their job would become my job if I tried to make up for them.

This assumes people are individually responsible and it is not a group effort where I should be helping them and they will be helping me. Then it is a shared job.

This is how people end up getting taken advantage of at their job

No. In the world of business, there’s an acknowledgement that its sometimes best for a project to NOT get done, rather than being the bagholder (ie: the one stuck doing the hard unappreciated work that no one else wants to do).

Its a common occurrence. “This would be great if someone did X job”, but it doesn’t mean YOU should do it, especially if you are working for a team or other group. If I am the team-lead of 100 programmers, its my job to make sure that we have 100 (or more) jobs available so that everyone remains employed. Getting us stuck doing difficult, long, unappreciated work is the fastest way that we all get fired.

Its better to do things 'the hard way", that’s selfishly (for us 100 people) beneficial, rather than doing things to the benefit of greater society. And programming is actually full of this situation.

Now yes, this leads to the whole world depending upon the heroic efforts of 2x open source developers who have been nearly unpaid for the past two decades to develop OpenSSL or whatever, but… that’s how it works sometimes. When you’re a team lead in charge of keeping a group of 100 (or 1000) healthy and full of work to do, you can’t just be doing things “for the benefit of overall society”, people are literally relying upon you to be cutthroat on behalf of them and get benefits to your own team.

Now what you’re supposed to do, is make a clear and convincing case to your superiors: the people in control of departments of 1000 or 10,000 people. You point out that “Hey, we’re fighting 100 vs 100 down here. But if you give us the money in XYZ ways, then we can better cooperate as a group”, then its now the responsibility of your boss to make sure that the job gets done.

If whatever you’re doing is to the benefit of multiple companies (ex: OpenGL is to the benefit of AMD/Intel/NVidia), you are supposed to split and create a new non-profit organization with split-control (different board members from AMD, Intel, and NVidia all sitting on the board) that develops the standard that benefits all three. Then, you get that organization to hire / develop the OpenGL or Vulkan work that everyone benefits from.

But if you’re say, an AMD developer… its a bad idea to just develop OpenGL by yourself (and let Intel / NVidia profit off of AMD’s hard work). There’s give and take here, and your competitors are also cutthroat. The Khronos Group exists purely as a political device to help these companies work together more closely, and that’s the only way that long-term sustainability between rival groups can really work together.

If I work at the deli in a grocery store, and they run out of cheese, then it’s my job to buy more cheese?

I kinda meant in life (like if you need to eat) but I love that everyone has healthy boundaries at work!