"But how could this ever be possible, in a field with high salaries and a permanent shortage of skilled workers?", you ask.
By constantly punishing us for caring. By continually providing shitty office space, and bullshit-driven work cultures and interview rituals. And just plain lying, toxic managers and co-workers to deal with.
And then asking us to invest the best years of our livesin all of the above, and then to "care" ... in exchange for not-so-great compensation, a joke vacation allowance - and zero job security.
People who take ownership and initiative for the things they work on get quickly promoted. If they don’t, there is usually some other issue (difficultly to work with) explicitly holding them back.
I have seen many otherwise great engineers take the mindset of “I’m paid to do X so I don’t care about making sure X is the right thing” and they just sit at the senior level their whole career. It’s not bad with current comp levels by any means, but they never move beyond it because they constantly telegraph that they aren’t interested with that attitude.
Keep a clock puncher mindset and you’ll get treated like one.
So companies want you to have faith in them to recognize your value sooner or later, but they don't give you any faith back in return, it's never the case that some HR manager says "oh let's give this guy a quick promotion, let's have faith in him!".
Another point, if one is a professional is supposed to do his job for the agreed rate and nothing more, nothing less so i should be evaluated in what my regular 8 hours of work are, and within the boundaries of my job description, nothing more, nothing less.
When you go to the butcher and order a 1kg steak, you pay precisely it's weight, not more, not less. Let's stop normalizing this "go above and beyond thing", it's not working (most managers suck at their job, scientifically proven), just be fair with the employees and respect everybody's time.
I will promote the person with regular output and an eye for outcomes, doing the right thing, improving process, etc over the one who just blindly runs at full steam all of the time.
If you think you’re at 200% and not getting recognized, step back and evaluate how much it’s really helping.
If you think it is, write out the argument you would make to get a 100% raise and try to negotiate it. You will likely receive candid feedback about how your grinding is not actually important for the team or the company. At that point you can cut back your push on doing X as fast as possible and start to focus on how and why you do X in the first place.
I can tell you from experience as a human being -- and having given many, many friends a shoulder to cry on over the years, in regard to this very issue: that this is of course what management always says in regard to how things work. But the reality on the ground (beneath the confident pronouncements, and fake glassdoor reviews) is often starkly different. And is ultimately what pushes people into the clock puncher mindset.
If they don’t, there is usually some other issue
Right, and it's always, always, always on the employee side -- is what you're basically saying.
No it’s not. Jumping to negative conclusions and engaging in bad faith definitely is a way to get passed over though.
There are lots of reasons, both managerial issues and employee issues, for someone to get passed over despite having the right mindset. My point wasn’t that it’s a guaranteed path to getting promotions. My point is that “not giving a shit” is nearly a guaranteed path to being passed over.
