This article is so strange - it's literally self contradiction. It defines preening as the activity that is highly visible and appreciated by management - yet

This article is so strange - it's literally self contradiction. It defines preening as the activity that is highly visible and appreciated by management - yet somehow it concludes that it isn't the thing that gets you promoted. In my experience what gets you promoted is doing highly visible work, soft skills, sucking up to management and being at the right place at the right time, as well as aggressively asking for promotion - in short, presenting the best possible image in the eyes of people who decide who gets promoted. If you quietly check in breakthrough features, fix up critical infrastructure, you might make/save the company a ton of money, but most middle management won't care, notice or understand your contributions. And the final contradiction is at the end of the article - doing good technical work most likely won't earn you any externally convertible recognition, and thus is useless for furthering your career. Your new employer might not even ask about what exactly you did at your previous job, and if they do, nobody can distinguish genuine work from the tall tales everyone tells about themselves.