Yeah I've worked in infrastructure through most of my career wherever such a distinction is available (or when it opens up), and this is a common complaint. Product folks get the most visibility and get kudos and parties for product launches. Meanwhile, the deployment infrastructure staying up is just expected, even though the engineers responsible for it are working hard to keep it up. It affects team morale (infrastructure teams are unrecognized for their hard work) and also has material affects on promotions and compensation as it's harder to justify business impact on these teams. I know folks that left infrastructure teams because of this dynamic.
Hired into a company. First day on job I find that the entire infrastructure team had quit. It was in a failing state.
told them flat out that they are most likely going out of business, but I’ll get it a try.
Couple of times owner tried to Ask me when feature X would be delivered. Just told them no. Managers were wise enough to understand they were one pissed tech guy from failure.
3 years of endless late nights to get company back to a good spot with a rebuilt time, new infrastructure. Proper documentation, the works.
Finally left after being passed over for promotion to a guy that did nothing, but promised the world. (He never delivered)
Took me a couple years to recover from that job.
I don’t work late nights anymore. If company doesn’t care to invest in infra, I look elsewhere.
If you are high in EQ and vaguely likable you can substitute for technical skill or hard work.
I had a colleague who was like a golden retriever and lacking in all talent. Everyone loved him. He never got anything important done and always worked on superficial shiny objects.
He was basically untouchable. Being optimistic and having no talent is a huge advantage.
The hard working workhorse industrious person always griping about how broken everything is: Can’t wait to get rid of you.
Don’t do great work for morons.
All of the collective results of these brutal lessons for me has been to become ultra cautious about where and who I work for and to try to do a much better job reading the room and analyzing people.
If you are an Aspergers person, this is super hard. I now do my best to get multiple second opinions about the situation because I learned my personal judgement and evaluation was nearly always wrong.
