One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America.

I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight.

You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.

That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.

This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a career inside a corporate environment. There is too much politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's what it takes I might as well do something that I own and control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss. I always thought the point of being an employee and having a limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things. That's the fair tradeoff.

So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy, Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't.

I've found that trust is a currency in a corporate environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the success of a project but don't claim it, there's a decent chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. And in the process you'll built up a good reputation and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.

It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect appearances either.

Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand scheme of things.

You don't have to self-promote aggressively, but you do have to advocate for your work

this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion.

Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if the first person finishes - but now the success is subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of the new individual.

Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming of solutions.

Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone. We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system that didn't even exist until very recently.

So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I can, while spending time on the things that actually matter: music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.

I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work.

What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem.

There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something.

I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way.

Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.

It shouldn’t be this way. Merit should be the metric. But it’s true. No matter how good or bad your numbers are, if Bob likes you, you’re good.

Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only your mother would love, be a writer… but get your voice out there.

You can own the narrative while also not being in the spotlight.

At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in any organization. So long as you can promote you and your team's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Leadership - your place is secure.

In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or responsibility.

So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals for the year and can communicate that to the relevant subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.