> The only skill you need to get promoted is to laugh at the jokes of your boss and schedule meetings to demo your n-th rewrite of the same thing.
As far as what the system actually tells you your job is: it's not to do good work, it's to be perceived as doing good work. This is an important distinction.
Notably, promotion in orgs makes demonstrating non-programming skills more important than anything else. Communicating a lot, and well, is likely a much faster route to a better title and better pay than digging into fiddly technical problems and saving the day that way.
You see a mediocre junior come in and carve a shockingly-fast path up the promotion ladder without ever getting good at programming—they're communicating better, and probably, especially, a lot more. The most-visible get promoted. Talk more, email more, message more, speak up in meetings more, call more meetings. Make yourself prominent in anything process- or architecture-related. It doesn't even need to be productive (most of that stuff's not).
The sad truth of how to get paid more in most orgs.
Yes! Figure out a way to make what you did visual, or nobody will care. Front end tasks are better to take than back end, because you don’t have to do extra work to produce a demo that’s not just text and numbers (and minor GUI changes still beat all but the most impressive benchmark graph, among many crowds). Factor the extra time-cost of this (sometimes more than the time it takes to do the actual work) into your estimates, when you can.
As a bonus, people who know nothing about programming, ux, or design, want to weigh in on UI. This provides a natural opportunity to have positive interactions with them, which is a very good thing. Ask if they want to have another meeting to go over their concerns one-on-one.
As far as what the system actually tells you your job is: it's not to do good work, it's to be perceived as doing good work. This is an important distinction.
Notably, promotion in orgs makes demonstrating non-programming skills more important than anything else. Communicating a lot, and well, is likely a much faster route to a better title and better pay than digging into fiddly technical problems and saving the day that way.
You see a mediocre junior come in and carve a shockingly-fast path up the promotion ladder without ever getting good at programming—they're communicating better, and probably, especially, a lot more. The most-visible get promoted. Talk more, email more, message more, speak up in meetings more, call more meetings. Make yourself prominent in anything process- or architecture-related. It doesn't even need to be productive (most of that stuff's not).
The sad truth of how to get paid more in most orgs.