How do engineers become higher-status or lower-status at large tech companies? In other words, what determines who gets promoted and who doesn’t, or who gets assigned the exciting difficult work and who gets put on keep-the-lights-on maintenance duty? Building a reputation The naive answer is that strong engineers are recognized and rewarded for their talent. There’s a grain of truth in this (talent does matter), but it’s broadly false. Many technically strong engineers go unrecognized and many ...