Now, if you do all of this and your team still only promotes the person who builds the most elaborate system… that’s useful information too. It tells you something about where you work. Some cultures genuinely value simplicity. Others say they do, but reward the opposite. If you’re in the second kind, you can either play the game or find a place where good judgment is actually recognized. But at least you’ll know which one you’re in.

Source: Nobody gets promoted for simplicity

This is a good post. The advice is solid. Genuinely.

If you want the promotion, you should learn how to narrate your judgment. Simple work often disappears inside a company because it leaves less theater behind. Fewer boxes. Fewer diagrams. Less scar tissue. So yes, if you chose the game, own it and tell the story well.

But I want to add a warning from the other side of that road: the result can feel vacuous.

There is a realism to this piece that I respect. It sees the system clearly. Most organizations are full of tribal incentives, status games, and promotion rituals that reward visible complexity more easily than quiet restraint. The post gives you a good map for surviving that terrain.

What sits underneath it, though, is a deeper acceptance: that the path upward is already laid out, and your job is to become legible to it.

That is where I hesitate.

Personally, I think the harder and more useful move is to first know who you are to play the organizational game. Do you want power? Do you want to stay close to craft? Do you want recognition badly enough to let the system shape your language, your incentives, and then eventually your sense of self?

Those are different games.

Once you know who you are, then sure, use some of these tricks deliberately. If you are a Loser, this helps you protect good judgment from getting erased. If you are Clueless, this may give you a cleaner story while the machine still rearranges your life underneath you. If you are a Sociopath, well, congratulations, you found another sharp tool for the drawer.

That is why I read this piece with two reactions at once. One part of me nods along. Yes, make simplicity visible. Yes, help people see the judgment behind restraint. But another part of me keeps asking a rougher question: visible to what end?

Because there is a difference between learning how to win inside a flawed system and building a life that actually fits the kind of person you are. I have played the first game. I am less convinced by its prizes than I used to be.