> 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.

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.

Game the system? That _is_ the system!