Here's something nobody told me for the first decade of my career.

Good work doesn't speak for itself. It ghosts.

You ship the thing. You fix what nobody else could. You pull the late night and the release goes out clean.

Management sees none of it. They see the outcome, not your nights.

Meanwhile the person who presented the work at the 10am demo, the one who didn't write a line of it, gets remembered.

That's the invisibility tax. You pay it every quarter you stay heads-down assuming the work gets noticed on its own.

It won't. The engineers who move up aren't doing the best work. They're the ones whose work is legible to the people deciding.

Two different skills. Nobody teaches the second one.

More tomorrow.

- Karell aka The Serious CTO