[kortilla]

>Hard work does not pay, corporations are not meritocracy.

The former is true, but the latter does not follow. The lesson of your story is that corporations are a meritocracy, but you need you need to work on stuff that helps your management directly.

If you’re working on something unofficially, you’re basically moonlighting so you’re taking a big gamble that it pays off into something better because you’re not doing your actual job.

[Negitivefrags]

This is really it right here. I actually find it amazing that such a significant percentage of people don’t actually understand what their job even is.

Your job is to work on what your manager wants done. It’s that simple.

Now if you have a bad mananger they may not be effective at communicating that to you. If that’s the case than it’s even easier to get ahead. You can be one of the few people that actually asks!

[Kamq]

Your job is to be (continuously) profitable. In a way that upper management can see.

You can do everything your manager wants, but if you aren't profitable, you're going to be let go as soon as a recession rolls around (possibly with your manager as well).

It's possible to get fired if you're profitable, but much harder. And if you're profitable enough, your manager will get overruled (the exact bounds of what is profitable enough vary a bit by company).

[kortilla]

> Your job is to be (continuously) profitable. In a way that upper management can see.

This is incorrect. Unless upper management is writing your reviews or you are extremely exceptional so you stand out, this is terrible advice. This is even worse if you’re ignoring your own manager’s requests in an attempt to do what you think “is right for the company”.

> you aren't profitable, you're going to be let go as soon as a recession rolls around

Not how it works at medium to large companies. When things aren’t profitable, they rank employees by ratings and then cut the bottom X%. When it comes to SWEs it’s much better to keep the good ones in unprofitable departments and cut underperforming people across the board. SWEs are not responsible for profit and their performance is going to be heavily based on manager reviews.

> It's possible to get fired if you're profitable, but much harder

It’s very rare to tie a specific SWE to profit. A department yet, a SWE not so much.

Your advice might apply to sales but it’s terrible for SWEs.

[zeroth32]

Are they meritocracy? How does it go with diversity and other noble goals? The only way for highly productive individual to get fair salary is to start their own business and do consulting. Or do shady stuff like over-employment!

That was official work, very senior manager pulled me out of project, and temporarily assigned me to different division. Not my fault paper work and finances between divisions never got sorted out, I did not even had access to that stuff!

[tikhonj]

That is, companies are a meritocracy as long as "merit" means "making your bosses happy".

[Negitivefrags]

You say that like it’s bad thing.

[ohgodplsno]

It's a horrible thing and makes your job merely about pleasing the whims of some random C-suite instead of doing something productive for society. I'd rather work on an assembly line, at least the machine is consistent about what it wants and doesn't change its mind because it just read an article about NFTs.

[kortilla]

On an assembly line you answer to a boss, not a machine. They can change the requirements on a whim there as well or change methodology.