Five Slices #21: How to get a promotion without doing the work
Weak links and strong links, Spy switcheroo, Quitting at the top, Read less talk more
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The invisible work of getting promoted
I like solving problems for the people in my life. There’s one problem I’ve been trying to solve for years: To get people promoted. I have objectively brilliant friends who are the first people I hit up when I need help. Other friends are the smartest fish in their pond, and yet, years have passed with nobody recognizing their hard work. I have no doubt that they deserve to get promoted – I’ve seen them burn their liver fixing critical issues at 3 am in the night, and I know so much about their office politics at this point that it’s like watching a real life version of The Office. So why are they stuck?
The problem isn’t that they don’t know what to do. The problem is that promotion needs self-promotion, and there’s a certain kind of personality that doesn’t want to be seen unless others lift them up.
wrote in “The Gervais Principle” that there are three kinds of employees:1Simple – Those who just want a stable job and don’t aspire for more. They just see the job as a job.
Dedicated – The people who actually keep the company together by going beyond what is required based on “loyalty” and belief in the company’s mission.
Strategic – The ones who understand that personal progress has nothing to do with the growth of the company, and it requires visibility and self-advocacy.
The terms here aren’t a judgement of their character. The Simple are actually quite competent and actually find happiness because they seek it outside their job. The Strategic ones aren’t evil – they understand incentives and align themselves with the right people to wield influence. The ones who have it hardest are the Dedicated who work out of a misplaced sense of loyalty and a revulsion for self-promotion.
But what do the Strategic players actually do to get promoted? I found this excellent (but cynical) article which gave a play-by-play breakdown of what it takes to move up the corporate jungle. To paraphrase the article:
Understand that today’s work will only have an impact three months from now. So start as many new initiatives as you can. Hire as many people as you can. Make a lot of noise. If it succeeds, stay on and take credit for it. If you get the sense that it’s stalling, jump to a new team. The upper management has no time to check who is accountable for each project. The blame will fall on the guy who replaces you. By then, you’ll be busy in your new team.
Never blame anyone directly. Say vague things like “we need to work toward paying off the technical debt.” And make sure that nothing critical breaks.
Now, all this sounds cathartic if you’re on the receiving end because it’s written by a Dedicated employee. But if he could see things in such high resolution, why couldn’t he adopt Strategic practices himself? The fact is that it’s a spectrum: These divisions are imaginary. Nobody’s purely Dedicated and you can’t rise as a Strategic player without doing any work. The Strategic players are the ones who do the admin and social tasks that the Dedicated ones don’t want to waste their time on: Who’s going to bargain with the management for an increased budget? Who’s going to attend fundraisers? Who’s going to decide whom to fire? If the Dedicated had the time and inclination to handle these hard decisions, they would be spending more time on it.
I don’t blame them, because seeing power dynamics is one thing, but mastering it is a full-time job. After all, the word for shrewd scheming, Machiavellian, comes from the Italian politician Niccolo Machiavelli who wrote The Prince, teaching dictators how to grab and maintain power. And despite his insights, he never gained power himself.
This isn’t a cynical rant against the system: But if your contributions to the company are important and you want to rise up the ladder, it’s a wake-up call to advocate for yourself because visibility and strategy are as important as the work itself.
I continued this conversation with ChatGPT here if you’re interested.
Edit: I have modified this piece a lot to soften it. The original version felt very callous and sloppily written to me, so I rewrote it to make it practical and not critical. It also turns out that in my chat with ChatGPT, the LLM goes way off-script by hallucinating stuff. Heads-up.
Weak and strong link problems
There are problems in your life where you can’t afford to be careless. It doesn’t matter if your legal documents are 99.9% thorough, because the one loophole you miss can land you in trouble. One faulty part can get your car in an accident, and one rotten food item can get you sick. You need to catch all weak-links.
But a lot of problems are strong-link problems. VC funds invest in 10 companies, out of which 9 can fail. If the 10th company does really well, the failures don’t matter. Three really good friends trump a 100 acquaintances. One good product is all a business needs, and all the failed experiments don’t matter. The strongest link carries the day.

Most fields are a combination of strong and weak links. For example, while investing your money, you want to defend against market crashes (weak links) but you also want to invest in a few high-risk bets that can make you rich (strong links).2 You need a great goalkeeper and defence (weak links) but you also need someone to score the goals (strong links). When you’re dealing with a problem the next time, think about how much you need to defend and how much you can explore.
Source: Experimental history. Thanks to
for sharing this.Spy switcheroo
Imagine living with a woman for twenty years, having a kid with her, and one day, discovering that she’s a man. That’s what happened to Bernard Boursicot.
Bernard worked at the French Embassy in Beijing and befriended Shi Pei Pu, an opera singer. They started seeing each other. After a while, Shi disappeared for a few years and came back with a four year old boy whom she insisted was Bernard’s son.
When Bernard returned to France, he took Shi and the boy with him. Years later, it was discovered that Shi had been leaking secret documents from Bernard to the Chinese government. Shi, it turned out, was a government spy—a man who had constructed an elaborate persona as part of his mission. I found it puzzling – how did Bernard not discover this in a twenty year relationship?
It’s possible Bernard knew all along—and that their relationship was queer or gender-nonconforming in ways the world wasn’t ready to see. Bernard was ridiculed widely for falling for the ruse. Though he was traumatized, Shi Pei Pu said “he still loved Bernard” before dying at the age of 70. What really happened between them, we’ll probably never know.
Edit: I had earlier played this off as a joke too, and I edited it because there was more to the story that I hadn’t explored.
When you hit that high note, walk off
Seinfeld is one of my favorite shows. It was one of the highest rated shows ever, but the real achievement was that it sustained this rating throughout its lifetime. Most TV shows start out great and get progressively worse if they run too long.

Seinfeld was one of the few who managed to followed his own advice: “Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, say good night and walk off.”
But why do so many TV shows die a slow death (or fall off a cliff like Game of Thrones)? Incentives, incentives, incentives. Nobody wants to kill the goose that’s laying the golden egg and studios try to milk the show for all its worth before it dies. Jerry Seinfeld said no when they offered him $5 million per episode to extend the show. It’s hard to walk away from that kind of money.
But it’s getting even worse now, with online streaming. After Severance’s second season had mixed reviews,
wrote an article analyzing why online streaming is betting heavy on cliffhangers and generic slop. It’s a good read.Read less, talk more
It took me a month to read Chip Wars. Great book. But I was looking for an answer to “Why doesn’t India have a semiconductor industry?” and the book had zero mentions of India till the end. I often read books cover to cover with a misplaced sense of hope and get terribly annoyed when I reach the end. Doomscrolling is easy to identify and trash but Doomreading is bit more pernicious.
Here’s how I plan to deal with it: By using ChatGPT. To prepare today’s post, I asked ChatGPT, “Do you know about the Gervais principle?” I didn’t want to reread the original article (which is like 40 pages long) and it saved me hours. I know friends who are reading dense books and research papers this way, and you can even explore books that are way too difficult for you by asking AI to explain every page.
Here’s a good article on how you can try this yourself.
It’s different with fiction, where you’re looking for an experience and not information. But with non-fiction, it helps to categorize books into:
Narrative books, like biographies or journalism
Tree books, that introduce frameworks, like Thinking, Fast and Slow
Branch books, that go deep into just one idea, like Atomic Habits
Tree books are worth reading fully to expand your thinking. It’s better to explore the other two types by having a conversation with AI before you dive in. There’s the risk that this might turn you lazy, but I prefer laziness to being driven by an indiscriminate sense of duty. I’ve had my fair share of that already.
One thing to keep in mind: ChatGPT has a limited context window.
When you ask it about a book, it might pull out relevant points—but it’ll just as easily invent the rest if it can’t find the information.
If you have a long chat, it forgets what you said in the beginning – and if you refer to something from the start, it’ll make stuff up.
So don’t rely on ChatGPT to be factually accurate. You can use it to find information fast, but you need to challenge and check it every once in a while by asking for sources and excerpts.
Edit: Slightly expanded to add a warning at the end.
If you enjoyed reading today’s post, drop a like and let me know what you liked in the comments. Also share with a friend who needs to see the part about office politics:
Last week I wrote about AI poetry that is more human than human poetry. You can check out the complete list of posts here.
Venkatesh Rao used the term Losers, Clueless, and Sociopaths. I changed this terminology because I felt it was needlessly judgmental and offensive. He doesn’t intend the terms in a value judgmental way, but it’s easy to miss.
Also called the Barbell strategy
This post really changed my mind I never knew I was among the losers group since I had always seen my job as just another job and just because I have to am saving this post.