I tried to do this sort of thing for many years, with mixed results. One constant is that no matter the outcome of my efforts, whether something I built made th

I tried to do this sort of thing for many years, with mixed results. One constant is that no matter the outcome of my efforts, whether something I built made the company money or was a waste, there was seldom any kind of conclusion or major takeaway. Making an impact has rarely helped me, not with promotions or prestige or even with getting a raise. Impact has been disconnected from any sort of return almost everywhere I have worked. What does get rewarded is your social network and your ability to present yourself in a pleasing manner. Even the concept of "career growth" seems like a relic from a bygone age, as if it were possible to measure a human's value to their company on some linear scale, when in fact the vast majority of "growth" along that scale simply results in a schedule packed with inane, endless meetings. Meetings in which social network and presentation come to dominate a structure that can be accurately described as a primitive pecking order. The value of expertise rapidly decays in rooms where no one actually does anything anymore. The advice in this article seems to be that if you just keep your head down and focus on making these impacts, someone, someday is sure to notice. It might take 20 years of being a doormat for the politicians, but you'll have retained your dignity (just perhaps not your keen sense of irony). And on that fabled judgement day, when at last your patience and diligence are recognized by a panel of wizened software elders, you will have earned passage into programmer Valhalla (another dev job, almost certainly reporting to another politician). My advice, would be to completely ignore all the performative speeches given by HR and others up in the hierarchy about values and goals and whatnot, because what tends to win the day in any group of humans larger than a handful hasn't changed in thousands of years: power. You either have it, or you must ultimately become a sycophant. Anyone outside that binary can be safely ignored, regardless of their impact, and plenty of companies do indeed blunder along on pure momentum, essentially forever, happy to ignore or absorb any accidental impacts originating from the fringes. As the article itself states, few care about company-wide success, only about whether they will personally benefit in some manner. It's a boring, reductive game in the end, but the good news is that it's really no one's fault, this is just how humans operate. Rather than appealing to the better angels of our nature, as this article nobly attempts, I posit it is better to accept the situation for what it is and make your peace with being stuck at whatever position in the hierarchy you can stomach sleazing your way into. The author would rather have you be an idealist, forever searching for the right group of leaders that will value your principles and your hard work. Feels a bit like titling at windmills to me, and perhaps as though the author is fluffing up their portfolio of "leaderly things I have said" in preparation for their next presentation.