You have to know how to drive the car

I've read the author's articles before and they really are quite cynical. It reminds me of all those 90s shows and movies where all the white-collar work was considered soul sucking and the people who did it were corporate stooges. As if a person should feel shame for working a job and paying bills.

As much as a person may choose to belittle the bureaucracy at companies, it exists for a reason, and often that reason is fairly sensible. It is also simple to avoid bureaucracy if you dislike bureaucracy: just go work at companies where it hasn't had a chance to build up or the company has intentionally kept its bureaucracy in check.

Regarding promotions in bureaucratic companies:

> "You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success"

Whats interesting is that all sorts of companies evaluate performance differently. The better companies will tell you how they are evaluating you - so if you want to get promoted, do the things they say you should do to get promoted. Glue work, crushing jira tickets, making the world a better place... are actually things that a company might positively evaluate you on... or maybe all they care about is shipping and you should just do that. The path to promotion is doing the things that a company is willing to promote you for ("If you want to be loved, be lovable").

For what its worth at Wells Fargo during the account scams your path to promotion was doing illegal stuff. So you know, maybe don't do that stuff and avoid promotion even if you can't leave your job right now.

I don't think I agree with this article. I thought "drive the car" was a metaphor for writing software, but no it's not. It's a metaphor for politics/visibility stuff.

And truth be told, you don't have to do politics/visibility stuff. It's true that thinking about that all the time probably increases your odds of getting promoted. But also, what if you obsess about optics/your boss's boss's opinions/crunching/visibility etc etc for 3 years and you end up not getting promoted anyways?

I feel like a certain type of content tries to invoke fomo in you in order to get you hooked on their promise of their content. Fundamentally I believe that you'll be happiest in your life if you work at a company that is small, has a good gender balance, has a good balance of personalities (i.e. not all competitive high-functioning spectrumy nerds), and doesn't obsess over hype-cycles.

I spent many years trying to get promoted and if I could do it over I wouldn't have, I'd just let it inevitably happen with years in the industry.

> You ought to know that crushing JIRA tickets is rarely a path to promotion (at least above mid-level), that glue work can be a trap, that you will be judged on the results of your projects, and therefore getting good at shipping projects is the path to career success.

Notice that the author didn't write "getting good at delivering value." They wrote "getting good at shipping projects" because

> Shipping is a social construct within a company.

Delivering solid software that helps people get work done is a platonic ideal. Unfortunately there are many companies that value whipping stuff out the door more highly. As corny as this sounds the iron triangle ("good, fast, cheap - pick two") is a thing for a reason. Crapping something out as quickly as possible and leaving others to deal with the fallout of a bad data model and chaotic on-call isn't something to be rewarded but it's how many companies seem to work.

Do you ever get tired of playing this “visibility,” “impact,” “promo politics” game and think, “I came into this industry because I like computers, not… whatever this is”?

I left a large tech company for a startup partly because of this. The politics of shipping were exhausting. At a certain scale, what gets rewarded isn't always what's valuable.

But I'd push back on the idea that all tech companies work this way. Smaller companies and startups can be different. The feedback loops are shorter, you're closer to customers, and it's harder to hide behind the appearance of shipping.

The trick is finding places where the incentives actually align with the work.

After a decade or so at startup/smaller companies, I moved to a big company in 2024 for the first time.

It amazes me how much low hanging fruit there is to grab to work on. At least things I felt would have had a truly positive impact on the customer and my own organisation.

The only way you get to work on it is if you don't ask for permission, but directly show some progress.

Now I'm switching to a different team within the same organisation that "wants to move like a start up". Let's see how things will move...

The more I read these kinds of things, the more I agree with

> The only way to truly opt out of big-company organizational politics is to avoid working at big companies altogether.

I've done plenty of really fun, engaging and interesting work in smaller companies. If you're able to be involved in open source work, what you do can still be something that many people appreciate, beyond the customers of your company,

Correction..how dysfunctional companies work..

There are two things that drive your value (aka salary):

1. Do people like working with you 2. What would a competitor pay to hire you

The driving factor in the first is your UI, the second your skills.

glue work is real work and a lot of projects get stalled or blocked because there was no glue; especially in SOA where you have different teams with differing roadmaps integrating with each other. It's not just about communication/socialization, but also how code interacts and how the contract is defined.

How many large tech companies has the author worked for? I don't see how general lessons can be drawn from the stuff on their LinkedIn.

Actual title: You Have to Know How to Drive the Car.

Actual theme: LARGE tech companies suck.

Declared subject: you have to know how tech companies work

Actually subject: you have to know how large-and-or-disfunctional-and-or-sales-or-finance-bro-led-companies work.

Tagging @dang re title.