How to grow professionally? I have no clue. I made some observations of my own. If you work at a company, you would expect the hierarchy to notice your ambitio

How to grow professionally? I have no clue. I made some observations of my own. If you work at a company, you would expect the hierarchy to notice your ambition and guide you to next level. In practice this does not happen or happens to only few people for variety of reasons. The company does not produce enough market value, there are too many skilled people with ambition, there are no networking opportunities, you were not noticeable that nobody took you under their wing, you are too odd to fit in, the industry is too young etc. One could only prepare self to look good, talk the talk and wait for an opportunity to arise. When I see so many managers ass-kissing their bosses, I believe they are doing the same, preparing for receiving. I once noticed an ambitious director making a spectacle while taking pictures of his boss when the boss was speaking to an audience. I really have no clue if these social engineering techniques work, but I notice so many people do it. If you are perceived technically strong, the hierarchy does not see you as leadership materiel. I witnessed this event that changed my perspective about over stressing my technical abilities. A bunch of people, almost all of them out of touch with technology sat down and the conversation started like this with someone saying - "I know this large company which takes this amazingly smart technical people and made them managers and directors and they are facing difficulty, in our awesome org we should never do that”. A bunch of other people around agree and they give their own experiences of horror stories. Such things gain wider acceptance because these meetings have less representation from someone who still see themselves as technically competent and current. I was in such a meeting and asked the group, if leadership is a skill that people are born with and what should technically strong people do for their career advancement? The answers were more ridiculous. Technical skill is seen as something you only need to have up to a limit and any more than that is not useful to the company. There is a ceiling if you are technically smart. The environment is self selecting what is needed for their business to strive. I found it smart to adapt sometimes but then I see a lot of these young people in silicon valley do amazing things and give themselves great titles. We both know that skills are transferrable between companies but titles may not be. I have more respect for these young people who create their own reality and make everybody believe theirs. Now Zuckerberg is still a CEO and they are still teaching people in MBA the skills to be a CEO or CIO or whatever it is and the magazines writing about the rules to be a CEO or CTO or CIO.