Your boss can know about it, but if their boss wants data on performance you’re back in the same boat.

Funny you mention engineers needing to market themselves though. That leads to its own consequences. I’ve been at a place where everyone needed to market their own work in order to get promoted, to get raises, and to stay off the chopping block.

The end result? The engineers at the company who get promoted are… good at self-promotion, not necessarily good at engineering. Many of the best engineers at the company—who were hired to do engineering—languish in obscurity while people who can game the system thrive. People get promoted who are only good at cranking out poorly-made deliverables that burden their team with excessive long-term maintenance issues. They fuck off to higher levels of the company, leaving their team to deal with the consequences of their previous work.

Run that script for five or ten years and it doesn’t seem to be working out well for the company.

When it comes time for layoffs, it generally isn't what your boss knows, it's what your boss's grandboss thinks to throw onto a spreadsheet at the eleventh hour before Quarterly Reports are due.

A good direct boss might keep you on track for a bonus or other "local advancement", maybe even a promotion, but many companies you are only as valued as the ant numbers you look like from the C Suite's mile high club. (Which doesn't protect your good boss, either.)

> The biggest mistake those employees make on their way to getting overlooked is assuming their boss knows.

100%. You ask me to do the near impossible, I'll pull it off. But you will be very well-versed in how hard it is first.

I agree it's a mistake but one thing that's never taken into account in this discussion is that many people find it enough that they are doing their jobs. They don't want to do marketing. A lot of tech people are like that which is a real tragedy.

The classic one too is that as somebody who puts out the fires, you get all the praise; whereas if you just do the damn job right from the beginning, nobody notices. Corollary: create as many fires as you can, just don't completely burn the whole thing to the ground.

While important, it actually misses a common problem I see: the assumption that every measurement is accurate.

It's got a name and we know that it's happening yet the overpaid overeducated c-suite demands it? What gives?

You could have made your point better without insulting everyone on the forum.

Interesting that something similar came up recently where an AI being trained might fake alignment with training goals.

Worse yet, these are upward-censored metrics. Failing to make them hurts your career, but making or exceeding your targets doesn’t really help your career—it’s just seen as validating management’s approach.

As soon as they impose metrics, you need to bring in a union, and (to be frank) chase or bug out anyone who’s not on board with worker solidarity.

Managers (as in PMs, EMs, and C-Suite) don't like JIRA either - there just isn't an alternative.

Customers and investors ask for delivery timelines and amount of resources invested on major features or products, and you need to give an accurate-ish answer, and you as a company will be dealing with hundreds if not thousands of features depending on size.

In that kind of a situation, the only way you can get that visibility is through JIRA (or a JIRA type product), because it acts as a forcing function to get a defensible estimate, and monitor progress.

Furthermore, due to tax laws, we need to track investments into features and initiatives, and JIRA becomes the easiest way to collect that kind of amoratization data.

Once some AI Agent to automate this whole program management/JIRA hygiene process exists, it will make life for everyone so much easier.

Why do you think that is? I’m wondering if the shared sacrifice of WW2 has something to do with it.

>The boomer types sat in the shadows and learned how to be toxic turds, and inflicted that on everyone.

The boomer types are now in their 70s and even 80s and mostly retired (or dead). It's the generations after them that run many of the anal-retentive, bureaucratically obsessive compulsive managerial postings today, and among those are a good number of gen z turds who are at least as toxic, while being smugly self-righteous about their habits. We'll be blaming boomers for decades after they're dead, for things long since out of their hands.

One of the consequences of WWII was that everyone's plans, ideas, and work cultures were turned into direct results very quickly, in the real world. Sometimes fatally.

The people who lived through that had their feet on the ground.

Aside from its many other flaws, post-70s neoliberalism added a bizarre abstraction layer of economic delusion over everything. This suppressed the core truths of physical reality, common sense, and the basic social requirement of sane reciprocal relationships, and did its best to make consequences as indirect and deniable as possible.

Things that really, really matter - like ecological, political, and social stability - were devalued in everyday experience and replaced with economic abstractions that are more mystical than practical.

It's very culty, and the disconnect between how things should be and how they really are is getting more and more obvious to everyone.

Why do you need unions for this as opposed to just a tight labor market?