> - Have someone in management or a PM who is good at selling your wins
Looking back on my career, one of the single biggest changes I could have made to improve my success was escaping teams with bad PMs as fast as possible.
Great PMs improve everything, but they're hard to find. I spent too much time sticking around on teams where bad PMs were driving us in the wrong direction and failing to interface effectively with the rest of the management team. As soon as something changed that removed those PMs from the situation, everything improved.
Totally agree. Having good PMs (and good designers) is indeed life changing.
And I mean it, it's a change like "going home at 5PM instead of crunching to deliver every other day".
The planning and the selling of the feature make rework much less necessary, plus you can work together and define tasks in a way that are more appropriate for the current software, rather than being stuck in a hamster wheel of changes that don't really push the product forward.
This is why I almost gave up SWE. My skills, abilities, and output had little to nothing to do with my career trajectory, it's only about getting higher ups to sing praises about things that I might not have even done.
Add to that when a new/junior manager comes along, they're too busy trying to show everyone that they're the centre of the universe for any actual progress to be made.
Edits: typos and spellchecker being too smart so words injected that didn't make sense
> it's only about getting higher ups to sing praises about things that I might not have even done.
If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company.
I'm talking about companies that are functioning okay, but they let the PMs drive what the team works on. A bad PM will send the entire team in the wrong direction and waste your time.
In the most extreme example, our PM would get distracted from the goals set by management and want us to do side quests all the time, so the entire team was constantly producing things that management didn't want while missing all of the things they wanted us to do. If your PM is the link between management and the team's directions, a bad PM will sink the team.
> If a company is so broken that promotions are decided based on factually incorrect information, there's nothing to do other than escape to a different company.
To me, this means that every traditionally run company (top-down) must be broken by construction. And indeed, I have never seen or heard of truly fact-based management.
The entire challenge with multi-level management is that you always play a long game of telephone with increasingly less technical people, which are unable (due to lack of time and understanding) to grasp the ground-truth facts without simplification. Thus, management based on hard facts is impossible in this setting, though it is a great theoretical ideal many aspire to.
In practice, doing so is very hard and people are lazy, so the "facts" can become so twisted as to be entirely unrecognizable.
If everywhere you look stinks, it's time to look under your own shoe.
No company is perfect, no team is perfect, no person magically knows what's right to do and has a perfect vision. Even if you get somewhere with the right team, right vision and right priorities, and you stick with them, the world will change and one of those will end up incorrect.
Looking back on my career, one of the single biggest changes I could have made to improve my success was escaping teams with bad PMs as fast as possible.
Great PMs improve everything, but they're hard to find. I spent too much time sticking around on teams where bad PMs were driving us in the wrong direction and failing to interface effectively with the rest of the management team. As soon as something changed that removed those PMs from the situation, everything improved.