This post has some big gaps. Who is this for? When is it relevant?
The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.
Excerpting:
> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.
If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job
So the rules of promotions:
1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable
2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")
3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)
I disagree with your rules. Not that they are bad - often they are the correct things to do, but they are not the rule.
The rule is "Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do".
Company politics is always the most important thing - but company politics shouldn't take very much time. (if it does either the productivity costs will kill the company soon or someone high up will figure your BS out and fire you). Company politics is what helps you know what they really want which sometimes differs from your assignment.
Most often that is your rules. Companies generally assign people to work they need done, so if you are not doing that work they are highly likely to notice that lack long before anything else you could do (no matter how much more they really need it).
In rare cases though you will see something more important that is needed and by doing that you will gain far more good attention and get the promotion. This is very hard to pull off though - you must be right, they need to know you did it, and they need to realize this is important before they realize you are not doing your "real job".
1. Sometimes we don't know what is most valuable (from the company's perspective).
2. It is easy to convince ourselves that whatever we want to do is really the most valuable thing (e.g., "Refactoring this massive subsystem will help the company in the long-term" or "Introducing this new technology (that I really like) will make it easier to recruit talent.")
That’s addressed in the article by the person who identified a need and came up with both a proposal and estimate to address it.
Now if that person just implemented completely with no feedback that would be very dangerous as it might not work, take longer, or management didn’t actually care about it very much. Getting to the point of proposal + estimate then sign off is the sweet spot.
I would encourage everyone to identify when these rules don't apply!
However, I think these rules are generally safer than the claim that you should do something other than what you've said you would do (or, perhaps, other than what your manager has said you will do)
And if you are doing something much more important, there's a new rule which was probably worth emphasizing more: communicate aggressively. Over communicate. If you're doing A but your manager thinks you are doing B, communicate quickly and often about why you are doing A, what the impact is, and when you will get back to B (or whether B should be deprioritized)
On re reading both of our replies I don't think we disagree:
> First, _. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured
And you say:
> Always do the thing that your company will find most valuable for you to do
Yes, sure! But if it's not what's expected, then you probably have additional work that is called "communicating impact". And unfortunately, if you want to get promoted, you are going to have to spend some time communicating impact (unless the impact is self-evident, in which case you have already successfully communicated the impact)
1. Sharing ai generated content is fine if you tell everyone what it is (I recommend also sharing prompts).
2. Ymmv, but my manager would want to know "roughly how much work would this be?" I don't think it's worth it for you to spend very much time answering that question _unless you're actually going to do the work_. This means I'm saying 2 things: first: if it's free for you, you should convey how difficult your proposal is. Very rough buckets are ok if they're pretty close. Second: an easy way for it to be free for you is to prompt codex, and I expect you will do a better job prompting the answer than your manager will
Reading the original post, I also felt it was kind of missing exactly that: when this advice would not actually apply?
The linked article here aligns very well with some of my thoughts. Esp in the example described I would say that, if you find yourself filling too many or too big gaps, maybe think why these gaps exist there in the first place. You may just so happen to fill a void that nobody actually cares much about getting it filled (or is able to get it filled), even if it is work that needs to be done to get projects running, even if people recognize that, even if it actually brings results. Sometimes some may not really understand what brings the results, even if everybody likes results in the end.
Sure, at this point, substitute in whatever responsibilities are given to the role you're seeking:
> If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work
Fwiw, most tech companies do not consider eng management to be a promotion. The path to becoming a manager is thus "figure out that you want to be a manager, discuss how such a transition would look with your manager, etc"
That said, if you're not already earning the trust of your team (you do the things you say you'll do, etc) you will not have an opportunity to manage
The opposite advice is essentially addressed in Being Glue by Tanya Reilly^. If you do a job that your management chain is not measuring, you won't be rewarded for it.
Excerpting:
> But sometimes a team ends up someone who isn't senior, but who happens to be good at this stuff. Someone who acts senior before they're senior. This kind of work makes the team better -- there's plenty of it to go around. But people aren't always rewarded for doing it.
If you take the op advice literally, you might find that you're not promoted AND management thinks you're bad at your job
So the rules of promotions:
1. First, do the things that are expected of you. If you don't do these things (or you do them in a way that management doesn't expect or can't measure) you will have to do additional work to make sure they get measured. Staff engineers are good at doing auxillary work and explaining why it's valuable. If you aren't, then focus on the things that are obviously valuable
2. If you're doing everything your team needs from you, now is a great time to do the additional work. Figure out where test coverage is anemic, profile that really slow query, write up your list of pain points and throw together a list of some initial ideas for solutions (codex & Claude can be great helps here, but don't be like OP. If you use AI to write something, let everyone know: "codex and I think these solutions might work, but I haven't spent much time on it")
3. Talk to your manager regularly (monthly) about what things you need to do to try going up for promo at the next cycle. Again, if you do this without doing (1), you're not getting promoted. That's why it's down here at (3)
^ https://www.noidea.dog/glue