> literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most impor

> literally in the text The ladders contain massive amount of criteria, most of which is not de-facto crucial, is weighed against other goals, and – most importantly – is vague enough to be open to interpretation. For instance, the "fix something that you broke yourself" can be packaged as "quality assurance work that is part of a long term initiative to leverage force multipliers to increase developer velocity". The promo committee and even your manager won't see through it, unless you make it stupidly obvious. Peers won't complain openly to avoid bad vibes (why should they care), so even if there was time for scrutiny (there isn't), there's virtually no paper trail. In reality, you are seen as proactive, a fixer, someone who takes care of problems when they come up. A good citizen. Some even do this unconsciously, because they overestimate their abilities and over-engineer things that break because it's infeasible to reason about complexity monsters in the first place.