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> and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. I can honestly say I d

> and even if you care deeply about other things (your product, your users, etc), you can’t really avoid caring about promotion as well. I can honestly say I didn't care about promotion while I was on the Windows accessibility team at Microsoft (as a Software Engineer II). The quoted assertion makes me wonder if I was being naive or lazy. I truly believed that I didn't need to care about promotion because the work I was doing was worthwhile for its own sake, i.e. I cared about the product and the users. In retrospect, maybe I didn't make the most of the opportunity I had there; I suppose I could have had more impact if I had leveled up. But I wasn't thinking that way at the time.

toast0 4y ago
The way I looked at it was: if I'm being paid enough, I care about being happy more than being paid more. Jumping through hoops to get promoted is going to get me more money and also make me do more stuff I don't want to do. I was happiest when I had a clear, important job to do, that everyone knew wasn't enough work for one person, and then the expectation that I'd spend the rest of the time fixing stuff that was nobody's job and freedom to set priorities for the most part (after all, if it was important, it should be somebody's job). Of course, at the last place, I think they have four engineers now doing my important job that left me mostly idle. Not sure how four people can work on it, but not my circus. I briefly had one person reporting to me (well two people, in sequence), and navigating performance reviews on behalf of someone else is not for me.