Summary: ‘Life is unfair’, chortles an opportunist who benefits from an unfair system.
In my personal experience I have gotten much more praise from Big Corp company when the work I did was more visible to management. The best work I’ve ever done was completely ignored because it was more technical and difficult for management to understand what the work was about.
And it wasn’t just about explaining the work, it just wasn’t that interesting to people who aren’t technical.
It was after getting an award for doing some extremely easy work, that I realized that it’s much more important that you communicate what you do, than actually doing useful work. And this sucks real bad, because if you do good work, it means you have to spend a bunch of time outside of that work just explaining it and acting like it’s a big deal, and you can easily beat the system by overrepresenting easy work, because you have a lot more time to explain what you did.
Just my experience with my Big Corp, it may not be quite like that everywhere.
We had a saying at one of my former employers, “You don’t get a medal for preventing a fire”. We worked so hard to prevent problems before they happened, but a lot of managers just thought of us as a pain in the neck. The only time anyone got wider recognition was for fixing problems after they had some serious impact. A lot of the time those problems would have been easily preventable. It really seemed like the teams that were constantly having major issues in production were constantly being hailed as heroes by management.
I think you may be failing to internalize the real lesson from your anecdote: how hard a task is has almost zero correlation with how valuable such task is for the business. If management didn’t care about the very difficult work you did, and assuming management actually has a good understanding of the business, then that very difficult work just wasn’t very valuable and maybe shouldnt’ve been done at all (because if you do a cost-benefit analysis, and something is really hard and the benefit small, it’s an easy call to not do it).
Of course, there are things that have almost no immediate benefit to the business but must be done, like when you need to refactor a large code base to be able to implement future features in a way that doesn’t destroy the software from within… but if you analyse such cases properly, their benefit is very big for the company in the long run and that’s where communication plays an important role: management needs to understand why that refactor is so important, which I admit may be difficult in case of non-technical management (but then you have bigger problems than just properly judging the cost-benefit of some task).
It’s also really tough for a non technical manager to assess a technical person, which makes sense. We have to different strengths and parts to play in the system, they can’t be expected to do their role and keep up with technical skills (if they ever had them to begin with). It’s a shame that we’re often encouraged to become more managerial to get ahead or to get more responsibility/“power” (in the sense of saying what we think needs to get done, or who should get recognition).
I really wish more companies would stop seeing managers as being bosses. I don’t know why a lot of places seem to think that dictatorships in the workplaces are the way to go. I’ve had so much success in places where my manager saw me (a technical lead) as an equal partner on a project, where both our opinions were weighted equally. I think it helped give those more introverted developers a voice. Since my responsibilty was the technical side I was really able to stay on top if their work and know what they were actually capable of. Some of my colleagues have had the same experience and it’s really helped us from keeping introverted talented devs from falling through the cracks.
I find it insulting when people of places of power say “life is not fair” to people complaining about things they’re in a position to fix. This person is a CTO and they say devs are being abused by the system. You are the top of the system, fix it!
Don’t worry too much about what your team members would think about you. Your team members might not like you for this, but they would respect you. And most importantly, your project manager will know you are a good, confident developer and better than others.”
What kind of crap advice is that? To just learn communication and claim the credits for yourself?
Yeah, you can get a bigger share of the small pie of budget recognition the company will set for your manager to split between you and your team. So instead of a sub-inflation salary review you get a slightly sub-inflation and everyone else gets their slightly lower?
Remember friends. Alone we beg, together we bargain. It’s not unlikely to see collective negotiations get 15% across the board! Stop settling for just being “above others”. Raise the bar for everyone!
It’s past time for us to negotiate as teams of engineering instead of individual devs that think each can just move jobs and get a higher contract. Some people can, but the best of us can’t, because of just how stressful job hunting is.
We only get the fairness we fight for. And as software engineers we have fought for nothing, so far. We surf a bull market and think we got paid for our skills and merit. Surprise: we didn’t. How many people have made way more money than the best of us, just dancing the money dance?
Let’s please strengthen our unions, so that we can negotiate when they try to push these shitty layoff seasons.
Sorry for the rant. :)
