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Comment by throwawayfaang9 | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, the emphasis on cross organization “impact” just leads principal engineer hopefuls to try to force other teams to sign onto large projects that require multiple teams to put in effort.

This rarely is beneficial work the company should/must do, instead it is promotion driven development.

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Agreed. There is also a natural disincentive here to optimize the architecture for "team-based flow". As a product engineer, you often get promoted for doing projects that essentially cope with a sub-optimal architecture. If you improve the architecture, there is less promotion fodder for the next person to get to these levels. In fact, I have myself literally been promoted for the former and NOT promoted for the latter.

Note that I am referring to product engineers. Platform/infra engineers necessarily have to work cross-team. And of course some "product" projects should be cross-team ... but if most or all of your product engineering projects are cross-team that is a huge red flag.

"This rarely is beneficial work the company should/must do, instead it is promotion driven development."

Unfortunately resume and promotion driven development are a very rational approach in most companies. If yo do what needs to be done in an efficient way, you will rarely get recognized and others who do shiny stuff will pass you by.

Yeah I know, but I guess I’m just not enough of a sociopath to climb the ladder in FAANG. Just stuck at Senior, probably forever.

Why do you think you need to be a sociopath to do that?

"Sociopath" is probably a little too harsh. But you need to look out for your advantage and not always only do what's good for the company. You also need to make sure you get credit for your accomplishments.

A little? It's a pretty strong word :-)

I agree with what you said, but I would have thought that was common knowledge. Your interests should always outweigh the company's. Anyone believing otherwise is eventually going to get an unpleasant surprise.

There is still a wide-spread belief that doing good things gets rewarded and that self-promotion is bad. That's the loophole a lot of business people exploit to enrich themselves at the expense of their workers.

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