Re: Keeping, and advancing in, your job

Many bosses will be happy to see you expand your role, as long as it isn't at the expense of the role you started out with.

I have different experiences. Rule No. 1 in my current workplace (and in other companies, too - from what I hear from colleages) is:

Keep a low profile! Don't do anything you have not been told. The more you do, the more likely is that you make an error somewhere. The more you invent, the more likely is that you fail at some point.

One negative impression the management gets about you weighs far more than ten positive. It's sad, but inevitable.

holli, /regexed monk/

Comment on Re: Keeping, and advancing in, your job

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Re^2: Keeping, and advancing in, your job by husker (Chaplain) on Mar 04, 2005 at 15:51 UTC
I would not enjoy working in a place that discourages innovation and reasonable risk-taking. How does anything ever get done in that environment? I hope that being in that environment does not squash all the creativity out of you, holli. If it begins to, get out!	[reply]
Re^2: Keeping, and advancing in, your job by Tanktalus (Canon) on Mar 04, 2005 at 19:04 UTC
My condolences. I did put in the next sentence "in a positive company" ;-) I've been explicitly told not to do things (then I usually do them in perl). They end up on my next yearly review as positives (one example was that I was told explicitly not to start a website for our department, it's now running using CGI::Application, HTML::Template, and XML::Twig - and I've had it as positives on my yearly review more than once). I've been not told to do things (that is, no one said anything about having to do them, often no one knows I'm doing them), I do them (again, usually in perl), and, again, positives in my yearly review. That's called "a positive company". Funny thing is that my manager is an extreme pessimist. My justification for all this extra work? I'm Lazy. I tell my manager how much time it took to do it, and how much time I've saved because of it (I put our frequently asked questions on the site, and every time someone asks one of the questions, I don't answer it: I point them to the site. Saves hours of retyping). When he sees it in pure resource cost, and sees the cost savings, he likes it and is happy. My experience may be more abnormal than I hoped. :-(	[reply]