I have a Nepalese friend, Pasang Sherpa, but we just call him Mani. The surname means he and his family are from that specific area.

He has done a lot of Nepal (obviously) but for work he mostly portered to Camp 3. He says he preferred that so much more as they would just leave the guide and the tourists and power ahead with way more weight. On some occassions they’d do a second trip between camps for a different group and pass the first group on the way back up.

He enjoyed it, but competition between families and non-Sherpa people using the ‘Sherpa’ name almost as a brand to appear like that’s their locale, started making it risky with poor reward. These days, there’s a chance your Sherpa isn’t actually a Sherpa and is someone from another area in Tibet or Nepal that hasn’t grown up in those specific mountains or even the Himalayas at all and is lacking all that generational knowledge. The increase in ‘Sherpa’ deaths is a combination of that and taking bigger risks to get the better paying jobs to try make it through off-season. It’s a bit cutthroat up there nowadays.

Edit: Oh, fun fact. His great uncle was the youngest Sherpa on the 1924 Mallory/Irvine expedition. This dudes done K2, Everest a bunch, spent his childhood at Kangchenjunga, but his great uncle is still cooler lol