The general sentiment of being aware about your career and decisions is true.

But this reminds me of what I hate about modern corporate “culture” the most. And what is broken about it the most.

Im speaking about the rat race. Tge fact, that you have to waste a noticeable part of your work time, effort and energy to sell your work instead of doing it. To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills. Those are very good at designing their careers.

As a result the more corrupted the company with this style of internal management the more reliable it drowns in a swamp of ineffectiveness.

In a well functioning company or society “building a career” shouldn’t be a goal nor priority. It should be the natural outcome (more or less) of a “job very well done” that is a true priority.

Yes we’re not in a perfect world. But at least we should try to reach our ideals rather than promoting rat race mentality as a norm.

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raw_anon_1111 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them? There is an entire theory called the “luck surface area” that says you need to do the work and tell people you did the work.

https://modelthinkers.com/mental-model/surface-area-of-luck

There is another similar school of thought that the only thing that matters in your career are “results and relationships”. It took me way too long to figure all of this out. But once I did, it made my life much easier and it made it much easier to navigate within my company and getting opportunities on the outside.

During the last ten or so years as a “developer” without doing a single coding interview because I do know how to sell myself (and deliver)…

1. I’ve gotten three jobs where the new manager/director/CTO hired me as one of their first technical hires to lead major initiatives

2. Got a job at BigTech without any coding interviews even though my job required hands on keyboard coding as part of the job - cloud consulting specializing in app dev (yes full time direct hire with bonuses and RSUs)

3. Left there and had a job within a week as a staff consultant (full time) with another consulting company.

I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.

On another note, you don’t and shouldn’t get a promotion based on doing your current job well. Just because you are a good developer doesn’t mean that you have the skills to lead other developers. That’s the entire point behind the “Peter Principle”. You have to show you are capable of working at the next level by working at the next level.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t make more money if you bring more value to a company than do done else at your level. But how is a company suppose to objectively manage that? You pulled more stories off the board? You had less QA defects?

For what it’s worth, I flew to close to the sun myself about a decade ago and realized I would suck as a manager of people. But I was getting better at leading projects. I chose the IC route.

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aristofun 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> I’m not smarter than anyone else, I learned how to network, talk the talk and play the game.

Congratulations that you learned how to game the system. Fair enough. That doesn't mean you should brag about it or celebrate that terrible "school of thought".

> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?

That's a simple part: it's your manager's direct and one of the main job responsibilities. It's like 80% of what manager job is all about. To be perfectly aware of what his team is doing, what was done good, what was bad, performance, strong, weak sides etc. For every individual report.

The hard part is to find the manager who at least understands that, even harder to find someone who are good at it. But in my limited experience it's not much harder than to find and spot a decent engineer.

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raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Its a gravity problem. Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building. You can either choose to accept gravity exists and not jump out of a 70 story building - or jump and die.

My manager’s job is not to manage my career. The last time I was a “pull tickets off the board maintained by someone else” developer was over a decade ago. Even then my project manager was different than my actual manager. My manager didn’t look at the Jira board for all of his reports are across teams to know what they were doing.

You still had to tell him yourself during 1 on 1s on high level. But even then, what were you going to tell him? “I pulled some well defined tickers off of a Jira board and I deserve a promotion?” There are so many people that are good enough to do that on either the enterprise CRUD side or the BigTech side, why should you be promoted for that?

On the other hand, except for my stint at BigTech between 2020-2023, I was already at the top of the technical IC chain as far as responsibility. There was no place to be promoted to. I have broad initiatives that I’m responsible for and still the manager just knows that things are running smoothly and the stake holders are happy. They definitely aren’t keeping up with my day to day work.

To be honest, outside of BigTech, worrying about promotions aren’t worth the effort, do your job, build your resume and hop to another job if you want more money. But even then, you can’t hope to get ahead in your career if you are content with just being a ticket taker and not taking on responsibilities that require you to navigate corporate culture.

I would much rather play the game than spend months grinding leetCode trying to pass coding interviews.

Right this second, I have reason to believe that I would have a greater than even chance of getting into Google via GCP in their internal consulting division based on a combination of experience (not with GCP in particular), soft skills, network, and knowing how the game is played than a hands on developer would trying to get in by being able to “codez real gud”.

I don’t because I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than work in any large company again and I’m damn sure not going back into an office.

Again, not because I’m smarter, I’ve accepted the game for what it is.

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BeetleB an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> My manager’s job is not to manage my career.

But it is to promote and demote. In many (most?) companies, to get a promotion he needs to actively advocate for you in front of others. That is part of his job. Many of them simply optimize to "I'm not going to do that part of the job well, so you, as my report, need to give me the material I can sell to others." And not "you need to do well so I can sell to others".

	▲	raw_anon_1111 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, that’s true. But that only happens if you give them something to work with. I volunteered for the thorny complicated initiatives at the startup I worked for prior to AWS. While there was no place to be “promoted to” besides being a team lead as an IC, it did give me the chance to have the skillset to get my next job. I specifically told my CTO - we had a good working relationship - that a team lead would be a demotion. I was already influencing the direction of the entire company. He couldn’t “promoted me”. But he gave me a nice raise and kept letting me choose the hairy work that crossed team boundaries. At BigTech, your manager can help you go through the promotion process. But it is still mostly out of their hands whether you get promoted. You have to prove you are deserving to a wider audience.

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aristofun an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> hop to another job if you want more money

I wonder on what planet are you working?

Virtually everyone I know in IT bumped their salary only after switching the companies, never I've seen anyone who raised their salary with comparable magnitude and/or pace by working hard at one place.

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raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent [-]

Isn’t that what I just said?

	▲	aristofun 9 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I apologize if I misunderstood it. It sounded to me like the opposite.

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aristofun an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

> Gravity doesn’t care whether you like it or not when you land after jumping out of a 70 story building

With one key difference - it's not a gravity. It's just currently popular and dominating style in IT corporate culture. Mainly because it worked once for few successful companies and others cargo-culted it without much thought.

There will always be value and importance to networking, human relationships and communication. Because after all we're people, not robots.

But there will also be shift and evolution in management styles, just like we notice a shift in Leetcode interviews right now (less and less of this bullshit).

Change is the true "gravity" here.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Can you change the corporate culture of the companies that pay top of market any more than you can change gravity? Sure I could change the culture by accepting a bullshit CTO position that is a glorified developer at a YC like startup that pays less than the intern I mentored when they got their return offer at BigTech and I could get meaningless “equity”. But if I were in a position where I wanted to maximize my comp, I would play the game and convince a company with a lot of money to give me some of that money. I just happen to care more about work life balance and making “enough” money now.

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hampelm 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Game the system? That _is_ the system!

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BeetleB 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> How will someone know what you’re doing if you don’t tell them?

They certainly seem to know when I'm not doing well, without me having to tell them.

Do you not see the asymmetry?

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aristofun an hour ago | parent [-]

yes, there are much more bad managers than good ones, also human brain is naturally wired to notice problems and warnings, rather than good news

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raw_anon_1111 an hour ago | parent [-]

So you can either bemoan “bad management” that you can’t change or accept it and play the game.

I love the autonomy I get now in the latter part of my career over the last 10 years where I don’t have a manager hovering.

	▲	aristofun 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		I don't bemoan actually, I'm just calling out things for what they are. I too learned to play the game and adapt the way it works for me.

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Aurornis 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> To the point where good salesmen make a “career” and become your bosses without any correlation to their work abilities or even management skills.

The few times I've seen this actually happen at a company, it was not the kind of company I wanted to work for long-term anyway.

If the company is so broken that the wrong people are being promoted while the right people are being ignored constantly, there will be bigger problems than you simply missing a promotion.

The one startup I worked for that had this problem chronically (combined with some nepotism) did a bee-line run straight for insolvency and then collapsed. Everyone on the ground floor saw it coming. Some people still tried to race for promotions and upward career trajectory there, but the smart ones invested their effort in getting out.

That said, I've also worked at some companies where the right people were getting promoted but there were groups of people with sour grapes he were always upset it wasn't them. It's never something everyone agrees on.

	▲	raw_anon_1111 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Every single major tech company that I am aware of (admittedly only two from 1st and 2nd hand knowledge) require you to submit a promo doc showing you “operating at the level you want to get promoted to”. You only can show that by getting those plum opportunities and that only happens through building the right relationships with the right people and knowing how to navigate corporate culture.

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jbs789 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.

If the company truly promotes incompetent salespeople then I’d steer clear of that company with the confidence that others are out there.

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aristofun an hour ago | parent [-]

> These things are not mutually exclusive. You can do a great job and learn how to communicate a job well done.

Absolutely! Nothing wrong with communicating your work and networking. It's better to do that than don't, it's a good thing to do, it's a great thing to help your manager to be aware of what's going on.

As long as it is not a mandatory requirement and expectation of an engineer that puts pressure and becomes a toil.

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raw_anon_1111 30 minutes ago | parent [-]

If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion to a job with more scope, responsibility and pay, there is nothing wrong with that trade off.

I’m at a point in my life where I am okay with the level of autonomy I have and have no interest in being a director or above and getting cost of living raises for the foreseeable future. But I’m 51 and an empty nester with me and my wife.

A line level manager position would be a vertical move. A director is a “manager of managers”.

	▲	aristofun 5 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> If you are okay with just being a ticket taker who us not aiming for a promotion I think your extreme example does not refute any of my points and I agree with you. "good manager" is not a guarantee for a good career, it's your responsibility ultimately.