alt Hacker NewsHmm. I had a recent example of why this is not as crazy a notion as corporates may want you to think. Guy in our team got burnt out, because he was ridden pretty hard by successive bosses, who did not understand why he is taking so long doing what he did.
He didn't quit, but he kinda broke and took some long term time off ( forget the exact legal framework ). So now the group as a whole has to recreate his processes that, while documented, did not account for constantly neglected changes imposed by other incoming timebombs ( all known and reported to management, mind ). So I spent hours in meeting yesterday trying to explain why things are thus to a new guy ( who appropriately was horrified -- and a little angry ) and his boss ( also new, just to spice things up ).
As it turns out, the guy was doing a lot, but was not good at making others notice that lack of him may make things difficult. Who knew? Well, I did. Did it help? No.
Bottom line. Be your best advocate. Don't kill yourself. None of this is real and, unless you really work as first responder, no one is going to die.
And I am saying this as a good corporate drone #9739843 not that many years ago.
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I agree, but to add: visibility goes waaaay beyond self-marketing.
I saw a situation just like the one you mention recently: guy burned out, broken inside, working way too much, but not being noticed at all.
Execs were basically claiming he didn't do a certain long-term task and that "nothing was delivered".
The problem is, there was a public Slack group for visibility with evidence of the task, artifacts of the task, plus relentless requests by a certain person that he deletes the data in there. This person is the same one who went around claiming he didn't deliver anything, a narrative that was bought by execs.
After presenting the evidence and being shown the artifacts in a meeting, no exec accepted reality, no exec walked back, and just shrugged off with "it's too hard for you to understand".
Half of this business is not really doing much work, and a big chunk of those are psychopaths that depend on throwing people under the bus to survive.
> None of this is real
Earlier in my career, I was at a sporting event and realized that tens of thousands of people all around me had a device in their pocket that I helped make, that my team made. Seeing it made it real.
Never underestimate your potential impact. Each of us makes decisions that change the world, that write a new future, every single day. Make the best of those opportunities.