I'm a dev lead. I'm trying to consolidate a squad. There's a senior in it preaching the dream of career climbing and LinkedIn optimization.

Now all interns want to switch squads. I'm all for personal growth... but now everyone wants to be everything at once and productivity stalled. The job descriptions for our squad were perfectly clear, there's tons of different tech stacks... We can build a lot of cool things in this scope, and now no one can see them because Data Science or Data Engineering or Front-end is suddenly sparkling.

I'm tired.

People can do everything but they have to have roles in the team. I can't imagine overlapping responsibilities since it means noone is responsible.

I am sharing your pain though.

@AtuM That's exactly it. I'm trying to share the pains of a Tech Lead with him, hoping he'd be a candidate to assume my position so I can hop back to being in my area of expertise. This hand-off also meant me stepping away from the day-to-day squad banter to increase his connection to the others. But now I'm extremely worried that his views might debase the squad, so I'll grab the reins yet again.

Who’s “on the hook” for having the team meet its goals? If it’s you, maybe see if some of those goals can be reassigned to this “senior” person. I’ve found that people like to rattle off fancy words and have teams play around with fantasy ideas for weeks on end until they get a deadline that can impact their careers. I learned this trick from a former manager: “If you think your ideas are so great, then I’m assigning this task to you and communicating up the chain that you’re taking this on.” That usually steers the attitudes toward a more realistic approach.