No, but I have seen people's career stall because they worked on the wrong project. As my manager put it at the time "Nobody gets promoted for reducing the siz

No, but I have seen people's career stall because they worked on the wrong project. As my manager put it at the time "Nobody gets promoted for reducing the size of a tire fire by 50%". You have to be really strategic about what you work on, and for who. It's not about the technical contributions, it's about finding and retaining a sponsor higher in the organization. You help them torpedo competing initiatives and increase the headcount they manage (headcount is points), and they help you navigate the political climate to get onto the project du jour. I worked at an old school BigCo for 3 years and we shipped not a single product from a team of ~300 people if you count peripherally involved people. The only thing that saved us was that we managed and maintained a small software tool used directly by the CTO of the conglomerate, which we could wave as a ward against interference. Some of those 300 got promotions, some got transferred (far away from their home and family, into different divisions that they had no experience with, aka exile), and some got laid off, even though as far as I could tell none of us had any ability to affect the end result (priorities changed too quickly to make any headway). For the record, I quit. Mean time between reorganizations, management shakeups, and goal shifts was ~2.5 months.