> I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I deleted tho

> I proudly and lovingly nursed the pipeline back to health. I fixed dozens of bugs and wrote automated tests to make sure they wouldn’t reappear. I deleted thousands of lines of code that were either dead or could be replaced by modern libraries. I documented the pipeline as I learned it so that the institutional knowledge was available to my teammates instead of siloed in my head. > The problem, as I discovered at promotion time, was that none of this was quantifiable. I couldn’t prove that anything I did had a positive impact on Google. I briefly took a part time job in college. It was at a mall, walking distance from school. It was a mid-range clothing brand that I can no longer remember the name of. Ostensibly, it was a sales position. I'm pretty sure the word sales was in the title. Anyone who has ever walked into a store like that knows there is very little sales (as in salespeople exhibiting selling skills to make sales) occurring. It's 99% "can I help you?" followed by "just looking". After a couple weeks my manager took me aside and said my sales numbers were bad. It wasn't a threat -- they were having a hard enough time keeping staffed -- but she pointed it out to me. So, under no pressure to actually change those numbers, I decided to do it anyway. I figured out that if you stand at the cash register and the customer didn't explicit tell you who helped them, you could claim the sale for yourself. A couple weeks later my numbers were through the roof! My manager congratulated me. I don't think it's uncharitable to say that my story would equip anyone to navigate 95% of the corporate world. There's a lot of FUD in this thread about working independently. So one more data point: I've known a number of people over the years that everyone here would know (by title if not by name). What do they have in common? They all struck out independently at some point in their careers. It's not either / or. Going independent early can be a great way to sidestep a lot of the ladder-climbing sillyness you'll have to do. It will also, if you're doing it right, make you a lot better at your job.