I agree with that. I've seen people get frustrated with this where they and their employer (as embodied by their manager or colleges) are talking past each other, in a sense.

Employee is very good at X, and wants their job to be about X and be judged on X. But to their manager and colleges, the job they want them to do is only partially about X; they'd also like a lot of Y and some Z in there as well.

Anyway, I generally agree with sentiment of the article, though it's too self-helpy for me.

Also: A lot of stuff happens in life that has no regard for your hard work, skill and diligence. Learning to roll with the punches is one of those soft skills everyone tends to need sooner or later, sometimes too frequently.

If this is true, you’ve hit the jackpot. Competence is usually rewarded by spreading the competent people thin enough that they rarely get to collaborate.

Being far above good isn't enough either. Being highly productive and effective result in work done faster.. and more work given !

Better to use your skill at your service rather seek/hope for promote.

> That’s how you increase your impact.

> High-agency people make things happen. Low-agency people wait.

> ...the best way to get what you want is to deserve it.

It's unclear what problem(s) this advice is meant to address but perhaps TFA means obstacles to promotion, although TFA seems to assume a strong correlation between "impact" or feature/product delivery and promotion/career-advancement.

The fastest way to get promoted is:

1. don't get fired/let go

2. frequently interview for higher positions with other companies and become good at interviewing

There are exceptions but, on average, it is much harder to advance via internal promotion than by getting hired somewhere else with a higher title/compensation.

The reason for this is multi-faceted:

1. It's difficult to measure employee value, so companies rarely have a good handle on it. This incentivizes set rates of advancement ("employees" perceive "fairness") and creates a fear of promoting someone unready or unreliable for a new position.

2. Employees want to "advance" by being promoted to positions with higher responsibility and higher compensation. The ability to allow for this advancement requires a higher level employee to leave or a business case for creating the position out of thin air. Thus, companies don't always have a position available.

3. (etc.)

pg and tptacek and patio11 really drove that home to me - they are as well known and well regarded as they are because they tell people about it, well and often.

Even if it’s just on an internal wiki - get the stuff in your head out there.

Love this quote.

And just a comment on agency: it's not necessarily rewarded or even acknowledged in all environments. Some expect that you're literally a worker-robot and just need someone to carry out menial tasks from up top. You don't want to end up at one of these places, regardless of what your life situation is.

For example maybe your company gets bought by private equity and 0 people get promoted for years on end.

Or maybe you have a speech impediment and you never get promoted beyond a certain point.

The only career advice is - if you want to get promoted understand the motivations of those who can promote and try to make it in their self-interest to promote you.

It's become easier to make "good enough" products that are of subpar quality. Just an example that's relevant for me recently: faucet heads. My local supermarket sells one that is identical—but 3 times the price—of one sold on AliExpress. The faucet head breaks after a few months.

If I start looking for them, I could make a whole post on goods and services like that.

So, while I agree that you must be excellent to stand out among your peers, that is certainly not what companies are recruiting or fostering. I didn't want to talk about LLMs, but one can easily imagine how that will impact product quality.

It's getting easier to be "good enough". Or at least fake it.

Slate Star Codex agrees https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/03/24/should-you-reverse-any...

> The biggest gains come from combining disciplines.

Someone else said it's a good trick to be good at two things, because there are N things but there are N-squared pairs of things, so it allows you to specialize in a smaller niche without spending a lot of effort on gaining new skills. Can't remember who.

Only a certain tiny subset of SV engineers have this hypercompetitive mindset. If you think you're LeBron, good luck to you.