[0xcafefood]

"they focus on promotions, career advancements, power consolidation, and not as much on work as the end goal in itself."

If true, that behavior in anyone should be criticized. This sounds to me like "gaming the system."

[mindover]

I disagree. This is just a different relationship with work - not better and not worse. Being focused on career advancements doesn’t make them (sorry for generalizing again) worse engineers or worse colleagues. Eg I don’t care about my IC level and enjoy coding, someone else cares more about their IC level and enjoys coding. Why should I care?

[0xcafefood]

Can you explain how focusing on "power consolidation" and not as much on the actual work makes someone a good colleague?