[bigcat12345678]

That's just some urban myth about promotion in big corp

Yes

There are a lot of vanity projects that get someone promoted for the wrong reasons

That only get broadcasted because that's the newsworthy. You won't get up voted when you share a small story about someone did hard problem and get promoted.

Overwhelmingly, people get promoted because they solve challenging problems with meaningful impact. That's how capitalism and modern corporation work.

But above the baseline there is a lot of errors, exceptions, and manipulations. Because that's how people do everyday: they want to game the system for their own gains. Human nature. There are just so many of them because big corps are big. And that's why big corps eventually lost their vigor.

The best way to combat promotion bullshit and other corporate bullshit, it's to recognize them, call them out in the right technique (being diplomatic and protect yourself) and don't practice yourself.

Yes, don't practice the bullshit. That's extraordinarily difficult.

[fshbbdssbbgdd]

I think it’s true both that most promotions are legit and not based on vanity projects, and yet still the vanity projects are common and causing major problems. Let’s say you have 10k engineers at your megacorp. Maybe the ideal number of execution platform workflow framework engines your business needs to add this year is 30, but instead 300 are created by 3% of your engineers who wants a promotion. Eventually you have thousands of these frameworks, maintaining them is a drag, everyone is suffering, although the vast majority are good actors.

[valicord]

Speaking from personal experience, the inverse of this is not necessary great either: the desire for the ever-growing scope leads to convincing everyone to switch to the "one true system" where previously multiple custom solutions were better fit for each individual problem.

[threeseed]

These projects don't just appear out of thin air and get funded.

It's because solutions don't exist to meet their unique requirements which often you don't get visibility of unless you're in the team.

But of course that will never stop HN commenters assuming they know better about the situation than the engineers and managers that work there.

[throw_nbvc1234]

> Overwhelmingly, people get promoted because they solve challenging problems with meaningful impact. That's how capitalism and modern corporation work.

It's key to ask, does the promotion (or strong performance rating) happen before the impact or after?

You can deliver Project X that will save $YY Million dollars. Everyone agrees the impact is "there", the complexity is there. Launch a PoC to a handful of use cases, realize most of that impact, then move onto something else. PoC works for those use cases, never becomes a complete solution, and slowly develops issues. Once it has enough issues, someone else can solve the problem again for the even more impact assuming the problem space has grown since the initial launch.

Capitalism works when there's competition and cost for (long-term) failure. Neither are guaranteed to exist if you're at a Big Corp that's printing money.

[bigcat12345678]

》Capitalism works when there's competition and cost for (long-term) failure. Neither are guaranteed to exist if you're at a Big Corp that's printing money.

Disagree

Big Corp print money still squeeze employees. See the record profit & revenue and 10k+ layoffs.