society create the überman myth to keep the working class down, thinking they will never be the top of their game. the ones doing the hiring know that those putting in 18hrs a day are the unicorns, i.e. the best they can hope to find.
I’m close to one of these types and I get taken advantage of a lot and desperately wish I could turn it off. It presents in weird ways that are hard to navigate politically - often I will end up on a team and be outputting a large majority of the work, people/egos get hurt or threatened, still inevitably make the same anyway. It's never really led to any kind of career or financial success I'd have thought it would have years ago.
You are halfway there my friend. The other half is tactful self promotion. Make sure your skip levels see what you’re doing. Do a little less for your team and a little more for other teams and make sure their leads know you’re helping. Become the legend you can and it will result in much success. Output is only half the picture.
This is something I've witnessed first hand for years, and heard for others too. I tried to be smarter politically but it's eating my brain. Wasted brain power for petty anthropological issues. I bet the solution is to be surrounded by quality people but it seems rare. Also negative people will do wonder to paint anything you do as a problem until they're able to do the same.
It can depend on your manager and the growth state of company. I don’t think I get take advantage of, but I’m very productive and have been rewarded for it.
I fixed a long standing bug that was a companies top priority for several months and no one had been able to fix it. They were talking about re-writing an entire app to resolve it, at a cost of 100's of thousands of dollar, dragging the vendor over the coals etc.
I was relatively new and thought I'd take a look, ignoring all the mystique surrounding the problem. It turned out to be a simple one line fix, just a dumb oversight that anyone who bothered to understand and step through the code would have caught.
Things got a little weird after that haha. The director who had been responsible for that department started ignoring me, while I started to get pulled into look at all sorts of other peoples urgent issues, with zero context, often with a team of other people I didn't know on the call.
It was fun while it lasted, but man, I'm glad I'm no Doogie Howser MD, that shit would go to your head!
People usually don't see the history of these kind of systems.
In most cases these issues are a result of similar kind of patching of a previous similar issue resulting in unexpected outcomes. (Probably going on for years)
From my experience management often tries to ignore the bigger refactors by using inexperienced people to patch things repeatedly, meanwhile the team suffocates under technical debt and responsibilities as a result of this mentality.
Sometimes its better to stick with the dev team for long term goals instead of becoming a "management puppet" for short term wins.
> society create the überman myth to keep the working class down, thinking they will never be the top of their game
What? The distribution of talent and grit being what it is, ubermen do exist. Some people are naturally tall, good-looking, able to recite pi to the 50th digit, solve challenging analytical problems, put in long hours when necessary, and get along with the in-laws.
Of course, the ones doing the hiring probably know that such people won't stay in the position for long. But it's not a myth, and certainly not one to keep anyone down.
