Work on what matters

I think all too often people structure projects as very large batches of work that only all work together and otherwise are waste. And in that case, the author's claim is true. But it's undesirable. That's an incredibly risky way to do things.

If, instead, the author means that a project is the atomic unit of work that creates value, then the claim is also true. And less risky.

But if a project is a set of smaller independent chunks of work that each incrementally add value on their own, I'll disagree. Delivering the project is not the only thing that matters. It may not be the most important thing.

delivering value > delivering projects

I think this tends to be lost on people who manage projects instead of value.

That's great in spirit, but you have absolutely no hope of determining that before joining a company, unless it's either a big enough company that its workings are effectively public (Google et al) or you personally know an insider.

What matters is only often clear in hindsight. Don’t focus too much on results, but focus on an inner concentration for your work that is decoupled from external rewards.

It defines preening as the activity that is highly visible and appreciated by management - yet somehow it concludes that it isn't the thing that gets you promoted.

In my experience what gets you promoted is doing highly visible work, soft skills, sucking up to management and being at the right place at the right time, as well as aggressively asking for promotion - in short, presenting the best possible image in the eyes of people who decide who gets promoted.

If you quietly check in breakthrough features, fix up critical infrastructure, you might make/save the company a ton of money, but most middle management won't care, notice or understand your contributions.

And the final contradiction is at the end of the article - doing good technical work most likely won't earn you any externally convertible recognition, and thus is useless for furthering your career. Your new employer might not even ask about what exactly you did at your previous job, and if they do, nobody can distinguish genuine work from the tall tales everyone tells about themselves.

- don't do stuff that clearly does not matter. This is elaborated to a reasonable degree.

- work where you can grow and add value. Obviously here it gets fuzzy but then by nature of this aspect there can't be a hard and fast recipe.