Not OP but I would say, generally non-engineering things that keep the business people happy. Project planning, delegating tasks, dashboards and metrics (customer feedback, if you can acquire it, is a big plus), setting and meeting deadlines, and knowing how to sell yourself.
There's that old (and very true) wisdom that if you solve a complex problem in two days, the business people won't think "wow, this guy is so smart and hard-working for solving that in 2 days." They will think "oh, this problem must not have been very hard to solve. Let's assign him extra work." Being a good engineer only gets you so far, career-wise.
Writing ample clear documentation, precision of communication, dutifully fulfilling all timesheets, logging of work performed, attending all requested meetings, and always delivering work on time.
All the "10x programmers" I've ever met have been taken advantage of way more and been used as company slaves more than the "clock watchers".
I'll "bend over" and be pleasant during a meeting. Then on Friday night I leave work, have a date night with my girlfriend and have to silence Slack because the 10x guy got suckered into working on some odd feature instead of living life. In the end, I get the same salary and the same equity. Who's the person actually being bent over by the industry here?
The correlation between performance and pay is really weak.
In my experience, probably negative too, since most work seem to be done by junior employees while the most seniors coast around fixing some bug every now and then on something they wrote some time ago.
Agreed. My primary motivation to be more productive is to free up work time for personal use. That's it. When I become a 10x developer and effectively work 1-2 hours a day I keep that to myself as a closely guarded secret. I know I will not receive 10x more pay for that increased productivity and I also know as I mention it the institution will find a way to take it from me for any number of unproductive reasons.
I’m telling you as a manager in a company that rewards productivity. We do refresher percentages and bonuses based on perf feedback from leads and peers.
Coasting senior clock punchers get base salary and little more. It’s easy for high performing people with lower titles to pass seniors in TC over a couple of years due to stacking perf bonus stock grants.
Absolutely. The problem with trying too hard to be a great craftsman is that you become emotionally invested. Most of your peers will not have this and will not understand it.
Someone else mentioned becoming a 10x developer and yet being surpassed in your career. That is absolutely very real.
> Your advice for being valuable is basically to slave away and follow your masters orders at daily scrum, not leave your box one minute outside of your allocated time , attend all bending over sessions and be pleasant as you take it , say what they want you to say with precision and always be whatever they want you to be i.e a massive people pleasing cuck with no principles that nobody can ever really trust or respect.
The paperwork matters far more than the actual work. Having your Jira tickets (or whatever) up to date and highly granular, and organized into all the taxonomies of sprints/epics/etc, and of course actually communicating status with teammates, tends to be significantly higher-valued than any actual code you're getting done, at least as far as winning brownie points and promotions are concerned.
