Your Reward for Great Work Is No More Great Work
The conference room smelled like whiteboard markers and quiet desperation. It was the 41st minute of a meeting about budget projections for a project that wouldn’t start for another 11 months. My mouse hand was asleep. My brain was not far behind. A single, insistent thought looped through my head, a drumbeat of pure panic: I haven’t written a line of code in six months.
Six months. 181 days. From senior engineer, the one they gave the gnarliest problems to, to Senior Engineering Manager, the one they gave the gnarliest spreadsheets to. They called it a promotion. A reward. They pointed to the org chart as if my new, higher box was a validation of the thousands of hours I’d spent deep in the machine, coaxing logic out of chaos. I was the best coder on the team, the one who could debug a legacy system by staring at it with enough intensity. My reward for that mastery was to be permanently removed from the tools.
It’s a bizarre corporate ritual, when you think about it. We take the person who is most brilliant at the core function of the business-writing code, designing products, healing patients, writing copy-and we “promote” them into a role that ensures they never perform that function again. We take our best violinist
