Building your sense of what's important at a tech company

I agree that understanding what work is considered essential at your company and getting assigned to it can accelerate your career, but I struggle to connect with most of the other points.

In particular, the idea that you can tank your reputation by being seen as doing other things during "all hands on deck" moments.

If your team regularly has "all hands on deck" moments, that itself is a negative signal; management isn't properly resourcing the team. In 16 years across multiple companies I can think of exactly one such moment. Even then, at that time I was in a hybrid management/IC role so I could "see behind the curtain", was in the manager chats, in the performance review meetings, etc. and there was none of what the article describes - no one noticing folks in chat asking unrelated questions, no one bringing it up or penalizing them, etc.

Many systems are interconnected. Most engineers can work on more than one thing at once, and often do because of human or technical blockers. Any manager who doesn't understand that and thinks people can or should focus one exactly one thing for extended periods should be removed from their position.

> During the times when you aren’t on a high-visibility project, I recommend carving out your own lab days or 20% time. (Maybe start with 10% time and work your way up.) This is a great way to rack up quick, bullet-point wins that can go on a promo packet or a resume.

Working for extrinsic incentives often fail to keep up - it is very hard to be motivated to do something because it will go on a promo packet after the first year when a packet doesn't happen.

Doing things for fun is great & that's what I do, also usually a step removed from my core expertise where I can do less damage in general.

But fun tends to have its own "flow" which might insulate you from other signs of organizational stress.

I've had these sort of "fun side quest" blow up in my face because I didn't realize there was a spotlight on me.

If you can't observe the spotlight coming down high on up, the same quirky day jaunt into some old code can be seen as "hard to direct".

This was also a side-effect of being a remote worker in 2005, because if I was in office I might have noticed there is a shift in tone.

This is probably spot on, but simply assumes that other perhaps worse problems around management can't or won't be fixed.

Optimal engineer positioning for a mismanaged environment is still probably a critical skill for promotion and career success.

Too bad this kind of careerist mentality is a/the problem at multiple levels.