[pc86]

People want to be "a really productive IC" and just churn out tickets and never have any meetings and be short with their peers. That's fine if you accept that there is a ceiling to your career if you behave that way, and that ceiling is far below Staff level both in terms of respect and also impact and compensation, and rightly so. But expecting to continue to get promotions and buckets of money for churning out JIRA tickets is not something that should be "normalized."

At some point you have to be nice to work with, be able to communicate to a group why you want to make the changes you want to make, be able to adapt those changes to fit in with changing demands from leadership, and/or be able to convince your boss's boss why it's worth pushing back on those changing demands. That's all still IC work. "Doing tickets" is great but is a small part of a bigger picture.