Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies

I work at a "large company", and I don't agree with most of this. Your write-up is highly subjective, and fairly pessimistic.

Some people hit the ground running, and teams/organizations/companies can thrive if they find ways to embrace that. Sometimes people get hired at the wrong level, and everyone benefits if some sort of work demonstrates that quickly. I have seen promotions happen based on prudent choices around one's individual strengths, simply by choosing to do a bit of the right work and getting eyes on your capabilities. There is no "one size fits all" prescription for what someone should work on.

Having a "shadow lead" can be one of the best situations for your growth, too. Not only do you get the experience leading a thing (for most of what that means, anyway), you may end up with a very strong ally when you knock it out of the park. I had a version of this experience, and I've watched others have it as well.

I'm guessing most of the negatives here are based on your personal experience, and for that I'm sorry. Hopefully you can encourage positive changes in your company's engineering culture.

I ran face-first into this effect at a successful startup where I started as employee number 9.

When everyone can sit around one big table, you don't have to consciously polish your "brand" all the time -- most people have direct experience with you and base their opinions on that. You do good work and you will have a good reputation. If you have a conflict with someone who is a jackass or have a project that fails to launch, people know enough about the context to judge pretty fairly.

When there are hundreds of people on the engineering team, especially in a remote-heavy workforce, most people don't have direct experience with you and can only base their opinion of you on what they hear from others, i.e. your reputation. This goes for peers as much as leadership.

You have to be aware of how an org changes over time, and how things that were once not important are now essential skills for success.. and decide if any new essentials are skills that you are interested in developing.

This seems generally true in my experience. Another aspect of this, from personal experience: while it may be easy to move around in a large organization, you risk losing reputational capital. I had a habit of building reputation in some team/platform, then after I no longer found it engaging or there was enough turnover/focus shift, I'd ask to transition to a wildly different team for a new challenge. It _is_ fun, but if you opt to start as an IC and work your way up, you're sorta letting the ratchet slip, and if you do it every couple years you may have broad experience, but your reputation (and likely level) will be well below where it could be.

Thus, unless you can ramp to expertise really quickly to leverage your skills developed elsewhere, I'd recommend (perhaps obviously) to try to move to peripheral teams where your skills and relationships transfer as much as possible.

I’m engineering adjacent (analytics / data sci) but my experience has been the best engineers pitch and pick their own projects rather than being assigned out weeks in advance.

Just recently an engineering manager told me “I trust [IC7 engineer] to go where he is most impactful”

So this isn’t the only model, and successfully identifying and pitching working on high impact projects is a seniority marker that will lead to rapid promotion. In any organization. The pitch may look different in different places but I promise you - if an engineer is successfully pitching and delivering high impact projects promotion WILL follow.

Identifying and pitching high impact projects is a combo of technical and soft skills though, and the way this happens depends on the org.

Something advice that I received that seemed truthy and actionable was:

Build your reputation by helping others get their job done while you do yours.

That was a part of the plot of Rand's _Fountainhead_, but you don't have to do it so selfishly, and doing it selflessly is possibly more effective in a non-stick workplace.

Is also contrary to football team advice, "stay in your lane and just do your job"; however, football teams are actually more like co-acting groups, where one may succeed while others, including the overall group, may fail so I'm not sure how applicable football advice is to the corporate world.

Problem for new hires is the onboarding process is very critical to determine if you'll be doing good work or not. Fighting against a code base all the time as you're left to your own devices is an uphill battle.

This seems to assume that engineers have no agency in the work they do—they are merely “assigned” tasks and they mindlessly carry them out. I don’t know what the authors experience has been but it doesn’t match mine in any of the places I’ve worked. Engineers typically have a lot of input about what they work on and if they are motivated can take on bigger projects right away. They can also extend the scope of assigned work to be much bigger than it was initially. All the best engineers I’ve worked with do this type of thing regularly.

After a decade plus in top tech:

Be the same ethnicity as engineering leadership in your org

This is a lot of words to describe hysteresis.

Able to talk like execs with those bombastic meaningless words get you more and faster result than what you describe here. You assume ratchet is always grinding thru within a company. Study mba then move out of the company after a few years then boomerang back still will achieve higher status than say your ratcheting. Stephen Elop was a good example. I doubt anyone will comment he was strong engineer. You need luck and significant talking skill. Strong or not strong technical skill, you can use chatgpt.

I don’t think author names need to be in the title

ohoh, nice article. ohoh, there are others and they seems to be high quality. fucking ohoh, a rss feed, no add.

In my feed and bookmarked.

very good writer, experienced dev.

Sidenote. Terrible reading experience due to the background color and shiny white font. Too bad for such fine content.