I'm stupid. I give people the praise they deserve, even when it hurts me.
Granted my role is very crossfunctional, but I think it's pretty unusual to be consistently impactful working in your own silo. So boosting my collaborators gets me the visibility benefits, without feeling insincere, and contributes to a work culture that is collaborative and supportive.
For context, I lead an analytics team at a FAANG company.
What if you're consistently doing good work but have zero visibility? Then years down the road, you notice a trend of people around you getting promotions/raises/bounses more often than you? The same people that slack off & lack integrity; to name a few. As a human being with emotions... can you honestly say you won't feel resentful in your moment of realization?
I am asking as someone who's been in that situation more times than I care to admit... I do good work for myself and for the sake of doing good work; I take pride in the work I do... but as most of it was never communicated, no one knew about it and just took it's results for granted; I was bypassed for raises, promotions, etc... Was it worth it? I can't give you a answer... it's a very conflicting place to be.
I think people have an obligation to share the work they do, especially if it's interesting or impactful. Because if you don't, then generally no one else will.
If you're not good a marketing a product, you should still spend 100% of your effort on making it great, and hire a marketing person to do the other part.
When your head is down in an interesting, thorny problem, it is easy to forget how those other folks are affected by your work, and it's easy to lose appreciation for the fact that their head is filled with a completely different information set. So it can be very useful to spend 5% of your time on this.
Or heck, just try 2.5% - one hour out of a standard work week. Personal anecdote: I wrote up a little thing about why customers would pick one video encoder over another, and marketing just did backflips and started asking my manager if I could write more things.
At that point, it's really your and your manager's (and so forth) responsibility to ensure your product or tool is in the right hands and helps people.
My manager was great at taking on some of the burdens and shielding me from above, while still giving me the flexibility and incentive to work with other teams and people to make sure I was the one everyone recognized for the work done, as opposed to the team or him.
In either case, at some point you have to convince someone else that it's worth investing their time. External, this can be dollars (although is that really the best way?). Internally (and optimally), you still need to self-market your product to marketers.
Either way, it's better to spend at least a little time doing marketing. Boiled down from all the hype and jargon, marketing is highlighting the benefits to another person. If an IC is working on a project where they don't know the benefits, there is a larger issue.
You can't hire a marketing person for yourself. Marketing yourself and your work is important because things don't magically get discovered or recognized.
Focusing on your own silo and blaming others for the team's failure results in dysfunction, not success. Instead, take ownership of your job and (shared) ownership of the other jobs that interact with it.
There are a lot of medium-small employers in lesser-known or unsexy domains that under normal circumstances struggle to compete with FAANG/similar to find people. How many are hiring right now I don't know, but it might be an option.
Mine is ruined and this might have contributed a little. I'll never be more than an intermediate developer and I'm worried about being fired/laid off.
Do you mean this at your specific company? I felt the same way in my last company because there was definitely nowhere to go up, but I've since moved on and am in a more senior role.
I'm also just tired of the bullshit and and mind games that management plays. My current plan is to gamble in the stock market and 'retire' whenever I can't take it anymore or get fired. I would love to retire to run a small farm and/or work a retail job like Lowes.
This is also, I think, how you find a job that is very stable and secure - focusing first and foremost on something other than technology until they can't imagine hiring someone off the street to replace you who doesn't know the business.
I actually have a business administration minor and trade options and equities, so I have a better understanding of finance and the business than most people I work with in IT. I work for a large financial company and my previous team was amazed that I passed my CFA Foundations class without studying (it's not difficult like the CFA level 2 or anything).
Maybe I'll reconsider becoming a business person.
I don't have any financial licenses or experience. I have a minor in business admin, but that doesn't mean much on a resume. So hardcore financial jobs aren't really an option. A tech job in a financial field could be good though.
The problem I'm finding with tech jobs is that they want an expert in a given technology. I have experience in Neoxam and FileNet, which are not very common. I would have to take an entry level job, but I'm just able to support my family now (with the hope of one day being able to retire). I'm also finding it much more difficult to learn new stacks as I'm getting older.
I’ve since moved on to different positions at different companies and am doing plenty fine. I’m even the senior member on a new team I’m joining now.
A few bad years or even many bad years don’t end your career :)
In this case I know the guy that got the high rating. As weird as it is to say, and even when the wound was fresh, I was/am happy for him and he deserved it. He's a nice guy and he had nothing to do with the rating I recieved. He's now a manager several levels up.
I'm also becoming demoralized after being looked over or screwed over for about 4 years.
Whether this works or not depends if you have any psychopathic coworkers, which isn't something you can really know very easily.
I also don't think the actions of others really define whether or not you are "intermediate," unless you're only talking about some corporate ladder bullshit.
I'm bad at communicating when I've worked on something challenging, so now I realize I should never give more effort than can be noticed. You may think that's cynical, but this is a business and I'm paid not on what I actually do but what the business perceives me of doing.
You do that by communicating. Where is lying and mind games involved?
It seems like most other people are talking about gaming metrics, not lying and playing games.
At my company, your rating should be evaluated against the standard according to HR policy. I have been given a low rating in the past simply because somebody else got a high rating. Some departments require that the highest rating be 'balanced' by giving someone a lower rating, even when they don't deserve it. I know this because I have friends in management who have confirmed this.
The year after this, I filled the role of a tech lead as an intermediate developer. I was a key part of an enterprise-wide upgrade and recieved a commendation from the leader of that initiative. I was up for the highest rating, but did not get it. Why? Somebody else on the team was also doing an awesome job and they didn't have an FDN from the prior year. Policy states that only the current year should be part of the rating. My manager even said they believed that I "...deserved a distinguished rating, but [they] couldn't get it". Not to mention, can you imagine giving two out of ten employees an FDN to balance out two distinguished?
I left that team for a new team. On this team I got an average rating, but 12% of my target bonus (we are a pay for performance shop). Why so low? Because I took parental leave and my point count wasn't as high as others'. HR policy forbids point comparisons and also forbids any negative impact from taking parental leave. This team also tried to state that my work as an Application Security Champion for the system was not to be counted as part of my job, but as a supplemental role. Policy stated that it should be considered part of my job. I filled this role for six teams across two departments and received very positive feedback from two individuals that I interacted within the security subdivision.
These are probably half of the major issues which impacted my monetary, promotion, or rating outcomes.
As for head games, they play too many to list. One very memorable one is how I was told by my manager that some people only have the potential to be an intermediate developer, but later being told that if I stay in that position too long they will try to get rid of me because if you stay in that position for too long it shows you don't have any potential.
That can lead to having to ‘lie’ or act overly proud of work you know is essential but boring.
I loved giving a brown bag on Raspberry Pi project to my teammates. I know it's not a great work related topic, but installing and using linux and tips on securing it was at least tangentially related.
I have to say, I wish I made lots of money.
I wonder how this kind of thinking starts. Is there any rationale for this?
If a coworker is given an above average grade, it means I'm much less likely to get one.
But in practice it doesn't matter too much because managers tend to distribute grades depending on time since last promotion/significant raise, to be able to justify the next one.