You are responsible for your own career. When (hypothetical) you get ready to look for another job, do you really want to only be able to say that you were a ticket taker or do you want to be able to say you led initiatives?
Even if you don’t really care about getting ahead, you still have to be able to stand out from other applicants
I was competent though, which is always a requirement; this won’t work for smooth talkers only.
Now when I interview you, I’m not going to ask you to reverse a btree on the whiteboard. I’m going to ask you questions to see if you can “handle ambiguity” and work at the scope I need you to work at.
I’ve spent the last decade mostly as one of the early technical hires for a major new initiative and then leading cloud consulting projects (3.5 years at Amazon and now at a third party company both full time). I need to know I can throw a vague set of business requirements at you and you can take the ball and run with it.
I actually did a thumbs down to a very smart guy who had been laid off from the AWS EC2 service team because when I asked him behavioral questions, I didn’t get a sense that he could handle the type of green field initiatives I was going to throw at him.
You don’t, actually. People love to be flattered, and the trick is to go find whoever is making the decisions and to flatter them.
You’re not immune to this either. No one is. Again, competence is a requirement, but flattery plus competence is a very powerful way to distinguish yourself.
I don’t hire ticket takers for the most part.
Again, let's not shift all the accountability to the guys lower on the ladder. It's a team effort.
Perhaps I just don't understand your mindset because I do not define myself by my career. Work is just how I exchange some of my time and effort for money so I can focus my life on the things I actually matter to me, so the "weight" of my career is perhaps different than yours. Which is fine, btw. I don't really have any issues if someone wants to make their career their life, but I'll never align with that, especially not at this late in my adult life.
The “team” doesn’t care about you being competitive when you are looking for your next job.
Love your email by the way.
As for the email, it was part of a now-dead idea that grew out of boredom one evening while chatting with some old computer friends, and definitely involved different sounding farts. Never really got past a few lines of code, but I have been thinking about using the domain for a cranky old git blog or something.
