I guess my question is: Can you get job satisfaction from promotion-focused work? I'm proud of what I've done. When I make someone else's life easier, that makes me feel good/satisfied with my work. I can't fathom satisfaction from impressing a promotion committee and tacking on a bigger title.
It's not necessarily a binary choice: you can do the same work, but be more strategic about how you promote it, before, during and after.
Before - make sure 3-5 key people know that you're working on something cool and are bought in
During - make sure any potential disrupters know about your work and see it as important (also minimizing the chances of someone crushing the project halfway through)
After - making a case to your line manager / promotion committee so it gets the rewards it deserved.
Otherwise, you've got a strategy for doing work that you personally may find rewarding, but which is unlikely to result in the career gains you want.
Except none of that would matter if some rando on promo committee (at Google) or just your skip-manager elsewhere (that you don't have access to) can't see value for whatever reason. OP doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of all the fuckery that was going on with Google's promo committees which is why they recently moved away from that for <L5 promos.
I don't give a shit about titles I just want to be paid appropriate to the value I create, and unfortunately in most companies, the best way to get a big salary bump is to get an upwards title change.
I remember one company I told them flat out - I'm going remote. Love it or leave it. They let me do it, but told me because - state has a lower salary in general, you may see some kind of 5% pay decrease at some point.
A month after I left to become a remote employee by boss called and said my salary raised 20K. No title change, just plain old doing what I wanted to do.
The general idea is that the things that would impress a promotion committee are things that you have done, that are good for the company.
That, of course, is not the truth everywhere, but anecdotally it's a lot truer than most people complaining about other people sucking up thinks it is.
The problem is in measurability of a change. If I improve a developer or analyst workflow that makes 100 people 1% more successful, that's likely both more beneficial and also harder to measure than a change that makes 5 people 10% more successful.
That's the bit where the GGP's "optimising for the right factors", or something adjacent to it comes in. Many things can't be objectively measured, and upon realising that, many techies give up. But there is subjective truth, which for sure is a lesser truth than the objective sort, but truth none the less. How did you come to believe that you've made 100 people 1% more successful? If you can convince yourself that you've done good, important work, you can probably convince other people too -- but you have to do it, they're not going to convince themselves. Collect the evidence, such as it is, and articulate your case.
The point is that it's on you to articulate the value of what you're doing. Some activities are "batteries included" when it comes to metrics, but a great many aren't.
If fixing bugs in the data pipeline is indeed valuable to the company, you can explain to the promotion panel how (after all, you convinced yourself).
It might be good for the company. But the point is you need dollars and cents metrics that prove it is, not just righteous feelings that less bugs is better. Engineers at ground level are often well insulated from the actual business impact of the work they do. Because they aren't given any insight into the business side they instead optimize for measurable metrics like bug count and data accuracy.
Because google has a "technical ladder" document which mentions words "complexity" and "impact" like a dozen times and the word "quality" like once or twice ;-) That document is supposed to be used by promo committees to eval if you are "ready".
