Bad Purchase posted:

it might be different at smaller companies dominated by the whims of mercurial bosses, but in large corporations promotions and raises are entirely vibes based. performance matters, but only so far as it leads to good feedback from you peers and management. that means you have to please management by making them look good, and generally for your peers i find it's easy to please them by proactively helping them when they're stuck or overloaded, even letting your own work fall behind sometimes to accommodate them.

middle management at every large corporations is dominated by incompetent self-interested people trying to climb the ladder while contributing nothing except the occasional bark in the 6 daily meetings they put on the team calendar, like "awesome sauce", "happy hump day", and "let's be part of the message, not the mess". the way to please them is to never come to them with problems that you haven't already solved. they will enjoy the illusion of shared success and the reinforcement of the reality bubble they make their home. sometimes you'll find competent managers, in which case you can work with them in a more honest manner, but the bad news is that you might actually need to be good at your job to succeed, so fair warning op.

but performance is not actually needed for advancement the majority of the time, which should be self-evident simply by looking at corporate pyramid which is top heavy with some of the most foolish people you'll ever meet. the reason is that corporate culture is metric obsessed and measures so many different aspects of job performance at so many different levels that nobody in management really understands what they're looking at when they "pull the metrics". and so they will immediately begin to manipulate and cherry pick things from the metrics based on the vibes-based narrative they already believe to be true, or flat out ignore them as wrong or misleading rather than change their opinions when presented with cold hard facts about their team.

i was a bit worried when i told my boss and boss's boss a loud and clear "No, never again" when the company did the return to work thing a couple years ago, but so far it has not mattered. everything above still holds true, and i've gotten not earth-shattering, but still decent raises since (~5% each year for the past two years, plus a 3 year vesting stock bonus that is pretty uncommon at my company) which is the same or better than the peers i've talked to who are back in the office. i am not currently angling for promotion because the levels above my current one come with strings i don't want attached, but i do not think WFH would hold me back at all if i pushed for it, because i've spent long enough cultivating vibes and mythology about myself that it would be tantamount to corporate heresy for a manager to give me a bad review at this point.