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This puts the cart before the horse. In reality, the biggest source of untapped potential, at least anecdotally as an engineer, is that corporations tend to give grease to squeaky wheels. So, the upper quadrants in the article. If you have even a few years of industry experience, modulo being intentionally naive, you've noticed that work begets work. The 'skilled pragmatists' quietly do their jobs well. Their reward is even more work to do, without much recognition. It's analogous to software quality. It's fleetingly rare that a consumer of software writes in to let you know how great, zippy and bug-free it is. You only ever hear about how terrible things are. When things are 'good' -- that's just the expected status quo. So no reward for steadily doing good things. I'm also sure after a few years in industry you've also noticed that the Do-Nothing (TM) guy who sprints around with their head on fire gets managerial recognition, promotions, bonuses. You know the kind. They wander from meeting to meeting, initiative to initiative, never actually accomplishing anything concrete, but showing their face to management and saying a lot of nice words. Eventually, the skilled pragmatist notices this dichotomy and mentally clocks out. I've heard this anecdote many times, both in online circles and IRL. |
I've been swept up into some of the promo-optimized guys' orbits, and it was deeply unpleasant. Lots of smoke and mirrors to execs...
Good leadership optimizes for looking at ground truths, rather than yes-men. Some places succeed at that more than others...