This is something I wish I'd understood earlier in my career. Your company doesn't care about you, nor should you expect them to. You might give 110% and be a well-regarded model employee. But I guarantee the day after you leave they'll advertise your position and replace you.
I’ve gotten laid off twice despite department VPs two levels up trying to keep me.
The second time I realized that there is no point in trusting in anything related to my relationship with the company.
It doesn’t matter how good you are when the people making decisions either don’t know or don’t care. Eventually you become inconvenient in some way and you get removed.
reversedly, I was at a company where I kept focusing on 'stuff', trying to respond on time, hit deadlines, etc. Went to lunch with someone and he kept saying "chill out, don't sweat it". We were late back from lunch. It bothered me, but not him. I found out a few months later he was dating the niece of the dept manager. The two of them were friends with another lead on the floor. This is why he was always 'chill' about stuff. He never hit deadlines or delivered great stuff... it didn't matter. He was 'in'.
Maybe he was in because he was pleasant to work with and not stressed all the time? I've seen new busybodies like you (maybe) and no one wants to be around them.
being given deadlines ("get XYZ done by march 1")... i take that as... "this needs to be done by march 1". This was very much more towards 'nepotism' than "oh he's just so pleasant".
Colleague (new, like me) was given task of "build web software feature X for the marketing team, and you have to ensure colleague B is trained". Colleague B ... did not understand browser technology or server vs client stuff (literally - 'how do you upload a file?' and 'how do you submit form data'?). Colleague tells boss "I can work on training B, or get feature done, but can't do both by the deadline in 2 weeks". "That's your problem, get it done". Feature was done, but marketing team didn't want it ("why did you build this?"), and B wasn't 'trained', and this reflected very very negatively on my colleague. The 'chill' guy? Regularly missed deadlines and delivered buggy stuff. But hey... he's chill, so everything must be cool, right?
If you have loose deadlines... just say "this is a loose deadline".
Unsure how doing work you were assigned is being a 'busy body', but hey, you were there, and I wasn't, right?
This is also a place where the tech leads in charge kept pronouncing that HTML tables were "depreciated" and we should build all tabular data in divs only. In 2004. As in "transform these dozens of Excel spreadsheet data in to something that looks like a table, but... hey you can't use tables, because they're depreciated". If you can't even use the word correctly... I'm not sure I can trust you. This effort took 8 people 3.5 weeks to recreate 'table-like' visuals (across Netscape and IE 5 and 6) with discrete CSS for each browser because... 'depreciated')... It should have taken 2 people a day, and initially it DID, because it was done, then... 8 people were roped in to redo it all without tables.
