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True. I realized I should leave a certain job right around the time I noticed that my quickest-promoted peers were the ones who handed off close to 100% of their responsibilities and, instead, spent their time organizing office karaoke nights, group lunches, and birthday parties. At one point, my boss (!) even confided in me that she rose very quickly up the ranks not by working hard, but by freeing herself up from her work in order to plan frivolous, but high-visibility office socials. (She sounded genuinely guilt-ridden in saying as much, though I suspect she was pretty good at compartmentalizing that guilt in the long run). Now, I'm not a naif. I realize that office politics is always going to be a decisive factor in one's career at BigCorp (if not in general). And I'm all for a fun office function. But when politics is the sole criterion for advancement, something's rotten in Denmark. Incidentally, I've noticed a strong correlation between this type of culture and the poor performance of said company. There's a general feeling, among middle management types, that the company is basically a giant ATM. You clock in, collect a fairly generous paycheck, and spend your time trying to do as little as possible for it. By contrast, what subsequently attracted me so much to the tech industry was a genuine engagement with one's job. You may not love every day of it, but you feel connected to what you're doing, and you actually want to see the results in the market. Typically there are fewer layers of abstraction between your work and the actual product, and so there's less room to emotionally distance yourself from it and slip into the clock in / clock out mentality. |