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Here's a non-technical one: I call it "screen politics". In the workplaces of the past, talented knowledge workers had two ways of getting ahead: by their work product (docs, slides, code, papers, etc) and by their interpersonal skills in close quarters office environments. Lunches in the office. F2F presentations to the bosses. Water cooler chit chat. This was both wonderful and miserable, depending on whether you were good at it, liked to do it, and were in the in-groups where it could make a difference. (Sadly, not everyone was, but let's park that for another long thread.) In the workplaces of today, you still havr the work product, but opportunities for face to face interaction in physical space are vastly reduced. You may think this is wonderful, and for many workers, it is, but it does make it much harder to get noticed and advance in your career. You are just a face on a Teams call. Your personable-ness is flattened by the intermediary screen and technology. Your challenge, then, is to learn screen politics. How to come across well with a screen between you and progress in your career. I don't think we know collectively how to do this yet. |
If you focus on making friends instead of enemies (or at least people know they can rely on you, and are willing to say so to management), the word will get around, and in this disconnected environment, managers spend more time asking around about how other employees are doing.
Put another way - your reputation is a lot more important now than it used to be. It's a lot harder to schmooze the bosses than it was in person.