Two months into my first real job, I was handed a team to run and a fifty-percent raise. I'd love to tell you it was because I was the sharpest coder in the building. I wasn't. It was something a lot more boring, and a lot more repeatable — which is exactly why I'm telling you about it instead of the coding.
The setup
My first job out of Carnegie Mellon was at Agot, a computer-vision startup founded by some CMU alums. The product is genuinely clever. Cameras watch the kitchen and check whether your fast-food order actually got made right: you ordered a burger with lettuce, the kitchen forgot the lettuce, and the system catches the mismatch between what was prepared and what got rung into the KDS — and pings the worker before it gets bagged. I joined at $100k as one of the early people, and watched the place go from two guys at a desk toward the fifty it would become, ~$60M on paper.
Everyone wanted the glamorous work. The models. The demos. The thing you screen-share in standup while people nod. Cameras that read a kitchen and call out a missing lettuce leaf — of course that's where everyone wanted to be.
I took the other thing.
The unglamorous thing nobody wanted
The Platform team owned the plumbing. The infrastructure every other team quietly ran on top of. It didn't demo. You can't screen-share a foundation. It was the layer nobody thinks about until the day it breaks and suddenly it's the only thing anyone can think about. So nobody was fighting for it.
I put my hand up for it.
Two months in, I was running it, and my pay went from $100k to $150k. Not because I out-coded anyone — I want to be precise about that, because the story only works if I don't flatter it. It was because I'd quietly made myself the person the whole product stood on. Once you own the foundation you stop being a line item on the org chart and start being load-bearing. Glamorous work competes with everyone else's glamorous work; there's a queue for it. Foundational work competes with no one, because no one else wants it. You just walk up and pick it up off the floor.
The part I couldn't prove until later
Here's the principle I pulled out of it, and for a long time it was just a thing I believed:
When you increase your value and you have any kind of surface area, it shows very fast.— my one note from that whole promotion
Owning the boring foundation is surface area. Every team that runs on your layer is a team that notices the day you make their life easier. That's the whole mechanic. Increase what you're actually worth, make sure it touches even a few people, and you don't have to campaign for anyone to notice — the noticing is automatic.
I only really proved this to myself years later, and not at a job. I'd quit, taught myself frontend from scratch (I was a backend engineer who'd never seriously touched JavaScript), and in an afternoon I made a dumb little zen-mode extension for Excalidraw — maybe forty lines, most of them written by the AI. Then I dropped it in Theo's Twitch chat. He lost it on stream, tweeted it, and it did ~100k views. Forty lines. A tiny amount of new value, thrown at a tiny bit of surface area, and it showed — within a day. Same law that got me the raise. It doesn't care whether it's a promotion or a browser extension.
The honest footnote
Now the part most career posts leave out, because I've got a whole essay on how school trained me to forget and I'd be a fraud to flex without it.
Getting handed responsibility fast is not the same as using it well. At both my jobs I had a quiet, ugly habit: when a genuinely hard, scary problem showed up — the kind where you might visibly not know the answer in front of people — I'd find a reason to route around it. It kept my ego intact. It also put a ceiling on how much I actually learned, and I built that ceiling myself. The promotion was real. So was the growth I skipped standing right underneath it.
So take the useful half and skip the part I got wrong. Find the thing everyone needs and no one wants, and own it. It'll get you noticed faster than any feature will, and the noticing does itself. Just don't confuse the title with the growth — that's a separate job, and it's the one nobody hands you. You have to walk up and pick that one up off the floor too.
It's the same instinct I point at my own projects now. The boring foundation is almost always where the leverage was hiding the whole time.
Keep going What school trained me to forget · The things I'm building now