The best engineers treat every project like someone just handed them their kid for the evening.
That sounds dramatic until you’ve worked with both kinds of engineers: the ones who immediately understand the stakes, and the ones who fill you with anxiety and regret the second you trust them with anything important.
Here’s the babysitter parable.
The babysitter parable#
It’s a Saturday night. You show up at 6. The mom meets you at the door and she looks exhausted. Not “long day at work” exhausted. “I haven’t slept more than three hours in a row for two weeks” exhausted. The toddler’s been sick. She starts walking you through the routine and you can tell she’s fighting the urge to just cancel the whole evening and stay home.
She shows you where the medicine is. She shows you the pediatrician’s number on the fridge. She tells you the baby’s been running a low fever but it broke this morning. She says all of this while glancing back at the nursery every thirty seconds.
Before she’s even done talking, you’re already adjusting. This isn’t a “put on a movie and chill” kind of night. This is a “send updates every hour with a photo” kind of night. Not because she asked you to. Because you can feel that she needs to see her kid is okay before she can relax at all.
So that’s what you do. An hour in, you text a photo of the kid eating dinner and smiling. “Temperature’s normal, we’re doing great.” She looks at her phone, exhales, and goes back to her evening. Two hours in, another photo. Kid’s in pajamas watching a movie, looking sleepy and content. By the third check-in she’s stopped hovering over her phone. She trusts you. She can actually enjoy her night.
Now flip it.
Different Saturday. Different family. The dad opens the door, points at the fridge, says “pizza money’s on the counter, bedtime’s 8:30, have fun” and he’s out the door before you’ve taken your shoes off.
This guy doesn’t need updates. He needs one quiet night where nobody texts him. You can feel it. If you blow up his phone with hourly status reports, you’re not being thorough. You’re being annoying. You’re the babysitter who doesn’t know when to back off.
So you send one text around bedtime. “Kids are down, everything went great, enjoy your night.” That’s it. He comes home, the house is clean, the kids are asleep. He books you again next weekend.
Same job both nights. Completely different situations. The only thing that changed was you paying attention.
Now think about the terrible babysitter. Maybe they ignored the kid and scrolled their phone all night. Maybe they texted the anxious mom once at 10pm: “yeah everything’s fine.” Maybe they blew up the relaxed dad’s phone every twenty minutes with updates he didn’t want. Maybe the parents came home to a disaster and the babysitter’s defense was “well, you didn’t tell me not to let them eat ice cream for dinner.”
You never call that babysitter again. You don’t give them a second chance. You don’t even think about it. The trust is gone in one evening.
This is the same thing that happens at work#
Every project you pick up is someone else’s baby.
Your product manager scoped it. Your designer sweated the details. Your stakeholder is betting their quarter on it. They’re handing it to you and trusting that you’ll care about the outcome the way they do.
The question isn’t “did I complete the ticket?” The question is “did I treat this project like it mattered?”
High-stakes launch with executives watching? More updates. Proactive communication. “Here’s where I am, here’s what I found, here’s what I’m doing about it.” Don’t wait to be asked. Silence makes people weird when the stakes are high.
Low-risk internal tool your team lead handed off because they trust you? Don’t create noise just to prove you’re busy. Ship it. Flag anything surprising. Show that you understood the assignment.
I’ve worked with engineers on both ends of this. Some people make you calmer the second you hand them something important. Other people go dark for two weeks. Deliver something that doesn’t match what was asked for. Miss a critical detail because they didn’t bother to understand the context. Treat someone’s high-stakes launch like a throwaway task.
Nobody sends you an email that says “we’ve lost trust in you.” That’s not how it works. You just stop getting put on the important projects. People stop requesting you by name. The interesting work dries up and you can’t figure out why. I’ve watched engineers blame politics or favoritism for this and, sure, sometimes those things are real. But a lot of the time the answer is simpler and more annoying: someone handed you their most important project and you didn’t take care of it.
When you get this right consistently, the opposite happens. You stop being “an engineer on the team” and start being the person everyone wants on their project. Product managers request you by name. Your manager fights to keep you in their org when reorgs happen. Not because you’re the best coder. Because people trust you.
None of this is an engineering skill#
This is a people problem. You do not get good at it by accident, and there’s no checklist for it. You get good at it by caring enough to pay attention every time someone hands you something that matters to them.
Treat the work like it matters because to the person who handed it to you, it does.
This post is about reading expectations nobody says out loud. The Mechanic Parable in my Dev Handbook covers the other side: what happens when both people have expectations and neither one states them explicitly.