If you want to reach the top floor, you have to stop being useful. It is a bitter realization that hit me this morning while I was sitting on my living room floor, surrounded by 24 pieces of a flat-pack bookshelf and zero M4 hex keys. I was staring at a screw that didn’t fit into a hole that shouldn’t have been there, and I realized that my career-and perhaps yours too-is currently being managed by the same logic that designed this furniture: it looks great in the catalog, but the structural integrity is a complete fiction. I spent 44 minutes trying to find a workaround for a missing bracket, only to realize that the manufacturer doesn’t care if the shelf holds books; they only care that I bought it.

I look at James Y., our disaster recovery coordinator. James Y. is the kind of man who has the entire architectural map of our server infrastructure burned into his retinas. He has survived 14 major system collapses, most of which happened at 3:04 AM on a Sunday. He is the person you call when the world is ending, yet when the department head position opened up last month, James wasn’t even on the shortlist. He was too busy preventing a data breach to attend the ‘optional’ strategy mixer at the local rooftop bar.

Instead, the promotion went to Sarah. Now, Sarah is a delightful person, but her primary contribution to the company over the last 124 days has been the word ‘synergy’ and a relentless ability to forward emails with the text ‘Great point!’ attached to them. Sarah survives because she is visible. She navigates the political geography of the office with the precision of a mountain goat, moving from meeting to meeting without ever leaving a footprint of actual production. She has mastered the art of the 64-slide deck that says absolutely nothing but uses a very modern color palette. In the corporate ecosystem, Sarah is the apex predator of optics.

Competency Inversion

This creates what I’ve started calling the ‘Competency Inversion.’ It’s a systemic decay where the people in charge of the systems no longer understand how the systems work. They understand the language of the systems-they can talk about ‘agile workflows’ and ‘vertical integration’ for 444 minutes without blinking-but if you asked them to actually execute a disaster recovery plan, they would stare at you with the same blank expression I gave that missing hex key this morning. The organization becomes a body that has forgotten how to move its own limbs, directed by a head that is only interested in how it looks in the mirror.

The Performance of Work

I’ve spent 14 years watching this play out across three different industries. It always starts the same way. A company starts with a core group of talented people who build something real. Then, the ‘survivors’ arrive. These aren’t the builders; they are the managers of the builders. They introduce 244 new KPIs that measure everything except quality. They turn work into a performance. James Y. told me once, over a lukewarm coffee that cost $4, that his job is 4% fixing servers and 96% explaining to people who have never seen a server why the servers need fixing. It’s a tragedy of wasted cognitive energy.

There is a fundamental dishonesty in how we value professional growth. We tell young graduates to ‘work hard and you’ll get ahead,’ but we don’t tell them that ‘working hard’ often acts as a weight that keeps you pinned to your current desk. If you are the only one who knows how to fix the legacy code, the company cannot afford to promote you into management. You are too valuable where you are. To get promoted, you have to become replaceable. You have to cultivate a level of strategic incompetence in the tasks that actually matter, freeing up your schedule for the tasks that don’t: networking, posturing, and attending 34 hours of ‘leadership development’ seminars that teach you how to delegate the work you’ve already stopped doing.

The Consumer vs. Corporate Discrepancy

When I think about the tools I use, I find myself craving a different kind of honesty. When I’m buying hardware, I don’t want a phone that is good at networking; I want a phone that has a battery that actually lasts and a processor that doesn’t choke on basic tasks. I want a warranty that means something. It is why I find myself gravitating toward places like

Bomba.md when I need tech; there’s a focus there on the tangible specs and the actual quality of the product rather than just the flashy marketing campaign. In the world of consumer electronics, if a product is all style and no substance, it gets returned. In the corporate world, if a person is all style and no substance, they get a corner office and a 44% increase in their bonus structure.

This discrepancy is exhausting. We are living in an era where the ‘performance of work’ has become more profitable than the ‘practice of work.’ We see it in the 104 unread Slack messages that are mostly emojis, and the way we celebrate ‘hustle culture’ while our actual infrastructure is crumbling. James Y. is currently working on a patch for a vulnerability that could cost the firm 554 thousand dollars if exploited. He is doing this while the rest of the executive team is in a 4-hour meeting discussing the font for the new mission statement. If James succeeds, no one will notice, because nothing went wrong. That is the curse of the truly competent: your greatest successes are invisible.

I wonder how long an organization can survive this inversion. You can only promote the ‘survivors’ for so long before you run out of people who actually know how to do the thing the company sells. It’s like building a house entirely out of people who are great at selling houses but have no idea what a load-bearing wall is. Eventually, the weight of the reality-the actual work, the actual servers, the actual customers-becomes too much, and the whole thing starts to lean. I can feel the lean in my own office. I can hear the creak in the floorboards every time Sarah announces a new ‘initiative’ that involves 24 new meetings and zero new lines of code.

We need more James Ys. We need more people who are willing to be the ‘invisible’ foundation. But more than that, we need a radical shift in how we define ‘success.’ Success shouldn’t be the reward for navigating a political minefield for 14 years without getting hit; it should be the reward for the mines you successfully disarmed. Until then, the survivors will keep climbing, the builders will keep building, and the rest of us will keep trying to assemble our lives with missing pieces and no hex key in sight. Is the view from the top even worth it if the ladder is made of smoke? I’ll let you know if I ever stop being useful enough to find out. For now, I have 34 more screws to tighten and a server migration to watch, just in case the world decides to end at 4:44 PM.

The True Measure of Impact