Sell yourself, sell your work

I've generally been best served by NAVY: never again volunteer yourself.

Others will advertise for you... or simply pay attention when you do well. Being reliable is outstanding, a true rarity.

Plenty of folks will want to take advantage. Assuming you weren't actually hired to work alone in a closet, there will be opportunities to shine/get put on speed dial... if you really want that.

This is, at best, incomplete.

Plenty of people are in situations where they don't appreciate someone's value until they're removed, or want to exploit the person and conceal that the person, and not themself, is providing the value.

The flip side is, as the management abstractions go up, they have less visibility into who's providing the value, so people who sell themselves better will be perceived better than people who just assume their work will speak for them. If your manager is also an engineer, it's obvious how you provide value to them, probably, but what about their manager, or theirs?

And? The world and our experiences are incomplete; this will never be addressed. Non-optimal performance is both normal and expected.

This advice, like all before and after, is not some atomic function to keep mindlessly smashing.

It works well enough; I was born dirt poor and now struggle to have free time to enjoy my pile of gold. Despite doing zero self-promotion through my career, I'm exceedingly well-known. The work and others spoke for me. Too much, I'd say.

Have an environment where you need to regularly over-extend yourself? Find a new one, you're clearly desirable. Layoffs/life happens, whatever.

There are plenty of downsides from subscribing to the rat race, some upside too. Debasing nonetheless. Guess who has to control that ratio. You. Others will take everything being offered... and then some more.

If anything, I'm championing discretion. Filtering is important! Truly no judgement to those who choose to be more involved, just speaking on my experience. YMMV of course.

Stolen quotes to close: "it sucks to suck" or "that's life". Promotion is like terrorism, only have to be lucky once.

Thank you for coming to my crash TEDhn talk on Game Theory :)

Working Corporate for 20+ years... still waiting on the PIP the 'dead' (hidden) peer comment mentions. Replying to myself since I can't with them. It's been a pretty good run, if I say so myself. Heh.

Based on the fear put into people I'd guess I'm overdue! Well, a break sounds nice. Can we skip to the quarterly layoff... or does this not count? I know those decently. Would love to spare a more fair soul.

If you get a PIP while doing objectively good work for not acknowledging the secret handshake: "move on." Save your efforts for a time and place that's worth it. Being played, IMO.