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Ratchet effects determine engineer reputation at large companies – sean goedecke
Why you can't skip to the top (but you can skip to the bottom)
In other words, what determines who gets promoted and who doesn’t, or who gets assigned the exciting difficult work and who gets put on keep-the-lights-on maintenance duty? If you keep delivering high-profile successes, you’ll be assigned higher-profile projects with more senior executive stakeholders, up to the point where the CEO is hand-picking you for their latest brainwave. It takes much longer for skip-level managers and other executives to change their mind about you, but it does happen (typically after a couple of higher-profile successes).
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