Andrey Agibalov In every project there are people who seem incredibly effective and others who barely move the needle. It’s easy to label them good or bad developers — but that’s often wrong. What we call “effectiveness” usually depends not on raw skill, but on the shape of contribution: how a person connects to the project, at which stages they join, and how their work flows into everyone else’s.
Some people think best when they start at the beginning — exploring the problem, shaping the idea, defining how things should work. Others thrive when the path is already laid out — they take what’s defined and make it real. Both are valuable, but they require very different shapes of involvement.
If you put someone who loves design and reasoning into a project where all the thinking has already been done, they’ll feel like a pair of hands instead of a mind. If you put a builder into a project full of endless discussion and uncertainty, they’ll feel trapped in words instead of work. Same skill, same intelligence — completely different result.
This is why ownership matters. When you’re part of designing a solution, you understand not just what to do but why. Your implementation becomes an extension of your reasoning — a manifestation of how you see the problem and what you believe is the right way to solve it. But when tasks just land on your desk, your connection to the project stays thin and brittle — you follow instructions, not ideas.
You can even see the shape mismatch inside one feature. When several people take turns on the same epic, each brings their own mental model. They rebuild, reinterpret, adjust the logic to fit their view. The system slowly turns into a mosaic of perspectives. It’s not about bad code — it’s about incompatible shapes trying to fit into one outline.
Real efficiency comes when your contribution fits the project’s structure — when you’re involved at the stages where your thinking adds the most value, and when that connection feels natural. A developer whose shape of contribution doesn’t match the project will always seem out of tune. But when the shapes fit, the work flows naturally — and you feel at home inside the system you’re shaping.