I ended up leaving for a startup

> I was at a AAA++++ brand FAANG. > The politics, from the second I joined, were so over-the-top. It was like Wrestlemania. Everyone was smashing eachother and throwing elbows and it was like a spectator sport about who could club who first and the loudest. This is phenomena I've seen played out in organizations which are flush with cash and want to hire "only the best", yet end up having multi-layered management building fiefdoms in order to affirm their importance. Bored smart people will find a way to make their days feel important. If it is not in the work they do, then it will be the political fights they have.

One of the key challenges that lies in remote work is the inability to truly know what's going on. You can have an idea, but you'll likely faces situations you cannot predict or cannot defend against.

What you describe feels like the inevitable end-game of what the article is promoting, and why I can't subscribe to it. I think there's a flipside to the argument too. If "good work" isn't enough, it means that those responsible for managing the employees doing "good work" aren't paying enough attention and that creates the need to self-advertise for promotion, as the article describes. But if there's an attention vacuum is it not also possible to hide, to some extent: as long as you continue to do good enough work to stay off the "bad" radar, then fit whatever you want into the spaces in between: Alternative productivity. I have a current theory about the application of KPIs and OKRs for measuring performance: they're to take the responsibility of actually managing people off the managers who are meant to be managing people; Outsourcing the management, oddly, to the managed. I'm current…