The Genius Sorting Tickets

September 24, 2026 SupportTrenches Management & Leadership Pitfalls 6 minutes

How "fair" workload distribution quietly buries your best engineer

The best engineer I ever worked with spent most of his week doing what amounted to shelf-stacking.

Not by accident. By policy.

He was one of those people who reads a stack trace the way other people read a the Sunday newspaper. Give him a kernel panic on a Friday afternoon and he would come back with a one-line patch and an explanation of why the vendor's documentation had been wrong since a version three years earlier. Undiagnosed autistic, most likely - never said it, never needed to. Terrible at status meetings. Catastrophic at self-promotion. Made a senior architect cry once, purely by being correct in public.

And his manager assigned him to the general queue rotation. Same volume of password resets, license questions and "have you tried restarting" tickets as everybody else.

Because that was fair.

The fairness that isn't

The official reasoning was elegant: everyone shares the boring work, nobody gets special treatment, morale stays intact. Written down like that, it sounds like leadership.

What actually happened: the team's one irreplaceable diagnostic capability was rationed down to roughly six hours a week, and the escalations he wasn't touching sat in the pipeline for days, quietly compounding into churn risk that nobody attributed to the rotation policy. Because nobody measures the cost of a genius doing data entry. There's no dashboard for that.

Look at the ratio for a second. The company paid a senior engineering salary for output that a competent intern could produce, while the work that only he could do - the work worth ten times his salary in retained revenue - waited in a queue. That gap between what an input costs and what it produces is the single loudest signal of a broken process, and it was screaming. Nobody heard it, because the queue looked balanced.

There was a second reason, less officially documented. His manager was afraid of him. Not physically - intellectually. Every technical conversation with him ended with the manager being slightly wrong in front of witnesses. Keeping him in the general queue solved that problem beautifully. A power horse 🐎 pulling a shopping cart can't outrun you.

Sameness is not fairness

Here's the part that management training gets backwards. Treating unequal contributors identically is not neutral. It is an active transfer of value from the productive to the average, and everybody in the room can see it happening.

Cornell research published in 2025 looked at a multinational pharmaceutical company that capped top performance ratings at one in five employees. People nominated for the top rating but denied it - purely because the quota was full - were at least 34% more likely to leave voluntarily, despite receiving bigger bonuses meant to soften the blow. Nearly as likely to leave as the worst performers. The money didn't fix it. The arbitrariness did the damage.

And it doesn't stop with the person affected. A study by sociologists at the University of South Carolina, published in Nature Human Behaviour, found that when a manager's rewards are visibly decoupled from effort, everybody slows down - including the people the bias favoured. If output doesn't determine reward, output becomes optional. Rational response.

So the "fair" rotation achieved a perfect trifecta: the top performer disengaged, the mid-performers learned that excellence carries no upside, and the manager kept his authority intact. Two out of three stakeholders satisfied. Or in other words: a king of ashes is still a king.

He left, eventually. Not dramatically. He just stopped renewing his interest in the place, took a role somewhere that let him do the thing he was built for, and the escalation backlog became someone else's mystery. Six months later, a customer with a seven-figure contract asked why response quality on hard cases had "changed." Nobody connected it to a rotation policy. Nobody ever does.

What to do instead

👉 Fair means equal access to opportunity and equal application of standards. It does not mean identical task lists for non-identical people. Stop confusing input equality with justice.

👉 Compute the ratio yourself. Take the fully loaded hourly cost of your most capable engineer, then look at what they actually did last week. If more than a third of it could have been done by someone in their first year, you have a process defect, not a staffing problem.

👉 Boring work still has to happen. Distribute it by cost of misallocation, not by headcount. Rotate the drudgery among people whose scarce skills aren't idling while they do it - and pay explicitly for the queue duty nobody wants.

👉 Audit your managers for intellectual insecurity. A manager who never gets publicly corrected by their team either has no experts, or has experts they've learned to keep quiet. Both are expensive. Ask the team who the smartest person in the room is, then check what that person spent the week on.

👉 Neurodivergent top performers are systematically underused because their value shows up in output and their weaknesses show up in meetings. Guess which one your promotion process measures. Build a path that rewards the deep-work profile without forcing it through a charisma filter.

👉 Watch for the tell: when someone says "we can't make an exception," ask whether the rule exists to protect the customer or to protect the org chart. Usually you'll find out in under ten seconds by how defensive the answer gets.

Equality of workload is the cheapest way to look fair while paying senior rates for junior output - and your best people will bill you for the insult on their way out the door.

👇 Who is the most capable person on your team, and what did they actually spend last week doing?

This article is also available in German.

ManagementRetentionCorporate CultureNeurodivergentAutismHRSoftware Engineering