I would quit, but I have to work off my debt first.
The environment is not doing me good - I'm slacking off (like here at HN), working worse and feeling tired and burned out even when doing little actual work.
Ultimately your current attitude will catch up with you could set your career back. Getting labeled as a slacker could result in you getting crappy projects where you can't grow professionally and personally. You'll become even more bitter/jaded and eventually hit a death spiral. Crappy projects <=> more bitter and jaded. It's very tough to get out of this death spiral once you're in it....
They're not nice people, suffice to say, and working for them is apparently no fun. Go figure.
Google has set up an environment that makes it pretty easy for people to transfer between groups, and even between sites. You have to be a grown-up about it, of course, and not ditch your team during some critical crunch time. But provided you exercise mature judgment in the matter, you can pretty much switch teams whenever you want, and it doesn't cause the company to grind to a halt, as such a policy would at other places I've worked or visited.
In our morning meetings, people update their status on the work they're doing. Even a simple "nice!" when warranted goes a long way, making them feel good in front of the group, and giving them a nice attitude for the rest of the day.
The asymmetry of the relationship makes it more likely for the employee to be get the short end of the stick. It's not inspiration and respect that get passed down the corporate ladder (in most companies). Many employees don't speak up for fear of repercussions (they are at the mercy of their managers, after all).
Maybe self-promotion wasn't a good choice of words on my part. Effective professional communication might be a better way to put it.
Rather than focusing on making yourself known, focus on identifying people who need problems solved. Meet with them directly, make sure they know you want to help, make sure they are comfortable with your solutions.
You should also make a point to identify and promote the successes of people you work with. In doing so you'll improve the team culture around you. Some those people will remember you kindly and promote your own stuff for you when appropriate.
Spend a lot of energy on problem solving and professional networking and you'll get there.
Susan wants a new application, so Jim tells Bob to write it. When the application is complete, Jim shows it to Susan, and Susan praises Jim rather than Bob, because as far as she is concerned, Jim made it happen. Yet, Jim did little more than tell Bob to do it and show the result to Susan. If recognition requires little work, Susan will praise Jim more often (if she is not aware of Bob, or chooses not to recognize him). If Bob sees this praise of Jim by Susan for his work enough times, he may leave the company one day citing "insufficient recognition", when, in fact, more recognition was being given, albeit to the wrong person.
If Jim "made it happen", he has actually earned some of that praise. As a good manager, his very next step should be to transmit and amplify that praise so that Bob also can bask in it, but also to educate/remind Susan that Jim has an entire team that is delivering behind the scenes. It's quite effective to accomplish both of those in one communication (when praise is in email form), by forwarding on to Bob, cc'ing Susan, adding his own praise and reminding Susan (in the clear) that Bob is the one who actually did the programming.
I don't believe that there's some natural conservation of credit/recognition. By sharing as above, Jim doesn't reduce his standing in Susan's eyes, because from her point of view, it's still Jim that "made it happen" and he's being gracious in recognizing his team. Bob now sees the praise that he's earned, may realize that Jim probably added some value along the way, and even if Bob is hardcore "only coding matters", at least Jim has set the record straight.
When done even halfway well, I don't think that pattern results in employees leaving over recognition.
I don't believe that there's some natural conservation of credit/recognition.
the thing is, the manager and the (good) tech are only very rarely in competition for the same promotions. Technical folks, generally speaking, move into management after they've gone as far as they think they can go as technical people.
Some people enjoy public praise or having their picture posted, but not all of us do. --Knowing that we're doing a good job and quiet/low key recognition on occasion is enough. And if our employer wants to give us a bonus, well, who's going to say no to that?
What HR fails to understand is my employees are professional managers and this is uncomfortably similar to giving a dog a treat when it sits up and begs. Given their incomes are well into the 6 figures, this is particularly ridiculous.
My reports know I have to occasionally hand out these token treats to appease HR and are well aware that I reward them for performance in their bonuses, where it counts.
We've made it an insider joke - I now throw a meeting once a month and hand these wretched things out. HR is invited to it and the staff gush effusively over the reward. I swear they are more motivated by the charade than anything.
Recognition arbitrage, employees claiming credit for the work of others, by corporate-climber types is probably to blame in many cases. From my experience, credit usually goes to whoever delivers the results or the news first. Smart corporate climbers will go to great lengths to be the first to take credit for new ideas or inventions within a company, and they will work hard to maintain a high profile.
I've tried to do a modest amount of self-promotion to stay visible within my companies after a few very bad experiences early in my career. Just as importantly, I try to go out of my way to call out another person's accomplishments whenever I get an opportunity.
A company that fails to recognize valuable people isn't likely to succeed. When self-aggrandizing people are promoted faster than the get-it-done types, I take it as a red flag that management has no clue how things are actually done within the company. Companies who instead go out of their way to recognize valuable team members and promote those who work hard will end up with competent and motivated management. Now if only I had identified this pattern earlier in my career I could have avoided some train-wreck companies.
At my last job, I was part of a major migration project that had taken something like three or four years total (I was only with them for the last two years). Because the project had come in so late and so overbudget, the powers that be set a seemingly arbitrary go-live date and told us to just get it done.
We all worked long hours for a long time to get this done, and when it finally went live we were told they wanted to take the team out for a celebration. That later morphed into "well, everyone else on the project (meaning client project, not my migration team) had to learn the new system too, so we should take everyone out to celebrate everyone!" completely minimizing just how much my team had done, since we had not only learn and adapt like everyone else had, but we learned it first and had to teach it to everyone else.
That celebration, btw, never ended up happening. Instead, there was an announcement at around the same time saying there would be no raises across the entire (10,000 person) company.
I got fed up and left (read: snapped and was fired) a few months later, but I heard from a friend that they had the same announcement this year ("no raises") on the same day that the company sent out an email saying "you should watch the Indy 500 this year, since we spent an assload to sponsor it".
That ended up as much more of a self-entitled rant than it was intended to be, but I think my underlying point still shines through.
The problem however is that for whatever reason, management isn't as effective as it should be. A function of time, burn out, or simple inadequacies, if people are leaving a job because they aren't recognized, chances are good that they would also say their manager wasn't very good at his or her job.
This is on top of an employee of the month program. Upper management takes this program very seriously (the award is a reasonable bonus, plus the winners for the year are given the opportunity to win an expenses-paid weekend vacation. This program is driven by employees as well--upper management cannot vote.
I'm not particularly driven by this sort of recognition, but it is comforting to know that folks genuinely want to reward others for a job well-done.
Don Draper: "That's what the money is for!"
Now, to be fair, I probably had enough clout (and they probably had enough sense) to make noise and get myself reassigned, but at that point I started looking elsewhere, and found something new to try. But I didn't start looking until I perceived my needs being neglected.
For example, I work at a company with ~50k people. My immediate boss is the "Sales Executive" for our division and, as such, is charged with establishing sales goals by region for our national sales force. Usually, he makes them up. When he realized that I was kind of a data geek, he decided to bump that responsibility to me (at this point I had been here less than a month.)
I did what I could with incomplete information and sent him a huge spreadsheet annotated with problems I expected him to correct based on an in-depth understanding of the situation. Turns out he doesn't really know how to use excel.
Long story short, my painstaking work to come up with rough numbers is passed off as somebody else's work to come up with great numbers (they weren't great numbers.)
This conveys a few things: A) My boss is fine taking credit for my work - this is obviously a problem; B) Nobody really noticed that my numbers were really bad - this is a bigger problem.
In an exit interview, this would be easy to categorize as "insufficient recognition," but the real problem is "nobody has any idea what the hell is going on and I'm getting off this boat before somebody puts my name on it."
For example: "I'm recognized on my team but what about the company at large"? or "Everyone at the company knows I'm great but our customers don't know me."
It was a tough decision for me, because I not only left the job but a steady paycheck. While the check may have been smaller than I'd have liked (or needed) there's something to be said for reliability. Being a contract dev has given me much more freedom and the ability to write my own paycheck, but it's definitely not easy. Some days I'd much rather be working for someone... but finding management that are willing to put themselves out there and communicate on the level needed to keep me happy is tough. I demand a very high level of communication because that's the way I've found to be able to do the best job I can. Make no mistake, I may be tough to get along with but I always strive to do the best job I can. I suppose the only one that really understands that and can deliver on those demands is me.
Employee validation is more complex. You can accomplish a lot, but piss a lot of people off and you've done wrong. You can make a lot of people happy but not get much done and only the standouts will notice.
Nobody wants it to be the care bear cousins, where everyone gets a gold star sticker and a cookie. On the other hand, when you work twice as hard as others to go above and beyond, you do want that to matter or you will burn out.
I don't really have a point. Maybe if they're oatmeal cookies?