this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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In my personal experience I have gotten much more praise from Big Corp company when the work I did was more visible to management. The best work I've ever done was completely ignored because it was more technical and difficult for management to understand what the work was about.
And it wasn't just about explaining the work, it just wasn't that interesting to people who aren't technical.
It was after getting an award for doing some extremely easy work, that I realized that it's much more important that you communicate what you do, than actually doing useful work. And this sucks real bad, because if you do good work, it means you have to spend a bunch of time outside of that work just explaining it and acting like it's a big deal, and you can easily beat the system by overrepresenting easy work, because you have a lot more time to explain what you did.
Just my experience with my Big Corp, it may not be quite like that everywhere.
We had a saying at one of my former employers, "You don't get a medal for preventing a fire". We worked so hard to prevent problems before they happened, but a lot of managers just thought of us as a pain in the neck. The only time anyone got wider recognition was for fixing problems after they had some serious impact. A lot of the time those problems would have been easily preventable. It really seemed like the teams that were constantly having major issues in production were constantly being hailed as heroes by management.
If you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all
I also work for Big Corp and you hit the nail on the head. I saw big career growth this past year after I started working on a very visible project vs. when I was working on the small, technical stuff.
Now that I think about it, it was the same way at Midsize Corp too...
I think you may be failing to internalize the real lesson from your anecdote: how hard a task is has almost zero correlation with how valuable such task is for the business. If management didn't care about the very difficult work you did, and assuming management actually has a good understanding of the business, then that very difficult work just wasn't very valuable and maybe shouldnt've been done at all (because if you do a cost-benefit analysis, and something is really hard and the benefit small, it's an easy call to not do it).
Of course, there are things that have almost no immediate benefit to the business but must be done, like when you need to refactor a large code base to be able to implement future features in a way that doesn't destroy the software from within... but if you analyse such cases properly, their benefit is very big for the company in the long run and that's where communication plays an important role: management needs to understand why that refactor is so important, which I admit may be difficult in case of non-technical management (but then you have bigger problems than just properly judging the cost-benefit of some task).