Legibility beats being indispensable for promotion
- YT :: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8f8mbDJbnQ
- Original title :: How I Lost The Promotion (And What It Taught Me)
Being the person a team can't run without feels like leverage from the inside, but from a leadership seat it reads as risk: someone too dangerous to move. The host draws on two personal stories - being passed over for a VP role despite being the most technically capable person for it, and later, as a first-time CTO, staying silent while a CEO friend repeatedly overrode his timelines and sat on budget decisions - to argue that technical correctness and promotion run on different evaluation criteria.
The first story: a VP seat opened up, he had the skills to fix the company's outdated systems, but the role went to an owner's friend instead. Years of subsequent decisions proved him right technically, but visibility, politics, and whether he was already seen as belonging in that room were what got evaluated - not raw skill. He eventually quit after the new CTO who replaced the friend disrespected him.
The second story is the one he says stuck harder: as a founder-CTO he let a friend/CEO repeatedly cut his timelines and ignore infrastructure spend he knew the business needed. Staying quiet, not the missed promotion years earlier, is what he says cost him the most - because that silence was his own choice, not someone else's decision imposed on him.
The takeaway: being irreplaceable is not leverage, it's the reason people get left in place. What gets rewarded with a title is the ability to make things run without being the bottleneck, made visible to the people making the decision - not just felt by the people who depend on you day to day. Technical skill isn't usually the blocker; positioning is.