Most career advice tells you to just upgrade your skills or grow your impact. But reflecting on my own path and my experience evaluating others, here are two major pieces of reality people rarely talk about.
Agree as a manager, to a certain point... There's two side to it, I see it a artisan making jewelry. For sure it depends a lot on the artisan, but you can't make great jewelry out of plastic. You need gold to work on. The points above stand, you definitel
Agree as a manager, to a certain point... There's two side to it, I see it a artisan making jewelry. For sure it depends a lot on the artisan, but you can't make great jewelry out of plastic. You need gold to work on.
The points above stand, you definitely need a manager to take care of all those things, but then you need to execute and excel on your own as well to give material to your manager to work with. So, continue being gold and rely on great jewelry makers to take care of the rest :)
I provided peer feedback for an engineer’s promotion again today and have some thoughts to share. I have worked for two different types of companies but I’ve never actually used any of the standard “promotion tips”.
For a long time, my career just moved forward naturally. But looking back, I realize that had less to do with me. Over the years, I worked for two completely different companies: 1, result-driven: this is straightforward. If you hit the goals and deliver your projects, you get promoted. 2, metric-driven: this is the corporate world of complex rubrics, calibration committees, and multi-layered processes.
in the second kind of company, hard work alone is never enough. My recent promotion only happened because my manager looked at the bigger picture, guided each step for me, and gathered all the internal data points to build a case for me. Honestly, without a manager willing to do that kind of heavy lifting behind the scenes, it wouldn’t have happened at all.
Most career advice tells you to just upgrade your skills or grow your impact. But reflecting on my own path and my experience evaluating others, here are the two major pieces of reality people rarely talk about.
1, when a company looks beyond raw output, your manager becomes the single most important factor in your growth. Doing good work is just the baseline; you need a manager who actually knows how to navigate the internal system and fight for you behind the scenes. A capable manager will fast-track you while an incapable or unsupportive one will leave you stuck forever, no matter how hard you work.
2, everyone is busy and nobody is tracking your day-to-day performance. If you want support from senior team members for your promotion, you need to get on the radar early. Go to the office hours, ask feedback on your designs, and ask challenging questions. I provided promotion feedbacks several times. I am always much more willing to write positive feedback and I actually have the specific data points to back it up for people who actively reach out and ask me questions.
How much of that case did your manager gather himself, and how much of it was already written down somewhere by you for him to find?
Point 2 is just: the review is a memory test and you are responsible for supplying the memory.
Point 2 is real and it is also where the cost lands unevenly. The person who books time with three staff engineers to ask challenging questions gets read as ambitious in some rooms and as pushy in others, and that read is not distributed randomly. I have watched two people run the same play in the same quarter and get very different words written about them.
The two company types look to me like one company at two sizes. Result driven works until there are more claims on the budget than there is budget, and then you get rubrics and a calibration room. Manager dependency is not a property of the second kind, it shows up the moment nobody can watch everyone directly.
Você tem toda a razão! O esforço é importante, mas não é o único caminho — muitas vezes falta oportunidade, reconhecimento ou até saber mostrar o que fazemos. Não se culpe quando o resultado não vem como esperado: a verdade não é só trabalhar muito, mas sim trabalhar com sabedoria!
---
After you worked with a good manager and switched to a bad manager, it feels even worse because of the comparing. In this case, do you think it is better to change team/company or just lower your expectation?
Agree as a manager, to a certain point... There's two side to it, I see it a artisan making jewelry. For sure it depends a lot on the artisan, but you can't make great jewelry out of plastic. You need gold to work on.
The points above stand, you definitely need a manager to take care of all those things, but then you need to execute and excel on your own as well to give material to your manager to work with. So, continue being gold and rely on great jewelry makers to take care of the rest :)
Curious about the feedback side of it. When someone you barely worked with asks you for promo feedback, does that read as genuine or as working the system? Wondering where you draw that line.
Point 1 is true and also a reason to leave. If your growth depends on one person being willing to do the paperwork, that is a single point of failure. Switching teams beat out-working a bad manager, twice.
The calibration part is the bit most people never see. By the time the committee meets, the decision is mostly already made in hallway conversations and in whatever your manager wrote down three months ago. Nobody in that room is going to reconstruct your year from scratch. Most of what your manager does for you happens before that meeting ever starts.
AI already tracks your work patterns better than your HR department does, yet most HR teams still run on spreadsheets and outdated policies. The trust gap between employees and HR makes AI adoption even harder, because most tools are built for employers, not employees. The smarter approach is flipping the model — giving employees direct access to AI-powered career tools, compliance calculators, and resume builders first, so trust and adoption follow naturally.
This is my insticts share urs
Could you please suggest what I should do as a fourth-year Journalism and Mass Communication student to make my career a little smoother?I've been watching my sister struggle every single day because she couldn't pursue the course she wanted. Seeing that is one of the reasons I chose this course. I thought it would give me more career options and better professional opportunities. Since I'm in a four-year program, I came across some internship opportunities through other people. However, I coul
The Rolex Submariner is the greatest fantasy object ever sold to men with Outlook calendars. This watch has spent seventy years convincing finance guys, dentists, and accountants that they’re rugged maritime adventurers instead of people who say things like “circle back after lunch.” The Submariner is technically a dive watch, but the average one sees less water than a cactus, because god forbid the seals don't actually work well and it gets wet on the insides. These things spend their lives…
There is a status deck somewhere in your company that nobody reads. It gets updated every few weeks, shown in a meeting, and forgotten. Your manager knows this too. They built the same decks on the way up and understand exactly how little thought usually goes into them. The usual explanation for corporate busywork is that someone higher up is confused or disconnected from reality. That's comforting, but mostly wrong. These artifacts survive because they're doing a job, just not the one they…
Meta bought the best engineers in the industry with the fattest comp packages anyone has ever seen, and got exactly what it paid for: a workforce of well-paid mercenaries who feel nothing for the place and will not say its name out loud at parties.
Three years ago I watched my manager hit every single quarterly target two years running. Clean dashboards. Green everywhere, all the time. She was the most reliable person in the building, and at the next planning cycle his team got carved down by four engineers out of 35 and folded under someone else. Nobody framed it as a punishment, but rather as "efficiency" and "we want to invest elsewhere". The lesson landed anyway, and not just on me. Sadly, never on my manager.
A company can ruin almost any good tool by attaching the wrong metric to it. Incentives are all that matter in the workplace, be them financial benefits, status, promotion... Workers work with incentives. You and me too. Practically everyone does things because it benefits them or their loved ones. Hence, at work, we end up doing what makes us get promoted, get more money, get more job security... We're not the owners of the company, we're an employee. We look out for ourselves. That's ok.