In my book, Strategic Software Engineering, there are two chapters that explore what success is from different perspectives. They are: "The Success of the Team Is the Success of the Product" and "Your Success Is the Success of Your Team". The titles of these two chapters intentionally use the same structure to convey that these two perspectives are deeply linked.
The main point I wanted to make is that the success of your personal career is directly linked to the success of the product you are building. Moreover, your career is also directly linked to the success of your teammates, because building a successful product requires a great team.
Every time you collaborate, share knowledge, or help a teammate, you are directly investing in your own career. And as a software engineer, there are countless ways to do this. Here are some just to name a few: pair programming with less experienced developers, being attentive during code reviews, giving honest and frequent feedback, participating during meetings, and sharing knowledge.
When you help the people around you become more effective, prevent them from making mistakes, and help them achieve their project goals, you are increasing the chances of the team being successful and therefore investing in your own career. This concept applies beyond just your fellow engineers, from designers to sales reps, everyone is working to achieve the same goal, and you can contribute to their success.
A seemingly contradictory concept related to this is the importance of being dispensable, here is an excerpt from the book that talks about it:
"Another way to empower the team to be successful is by making yourself dispensable. Yes, dispensable, not indispensable. In fact, ideally, your absence should not provoke a noticeable change in the short-term performance of your team. In a mature and functional team, every person should be able to go on vacation, take time off to recover from illness, and assist their relatives with the peace of mind that it won't have a major impact on the overall performance of the team or lead to an incident. This is only achievable when everyone becomes dispensable. Being dispensable means that you do your work publicly and that you communicate progress, it means you write good code that is understandable and easy to maintain, it means that you plan and write documentation and that you capacitate other people to execute routines that you are in charge of."
So the next time you're wasting your time to help a teammate, think twice, because by doing that you are also investing in your own career.
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