> Communicating this effectively is far more important than actually doing it, so I'd recommend spending 90% of your working time on this communication, and no more than 10% of your working time on actual problem solving.

...seems out of whack. We've probably all worked with someone like this, who did very little actual work and spent all their time on self-promotion and political maneuvering. They make awful teammates and bring everybody else down.

It's definitely worth advertising when you do solve problems, of course. If you hit a tricky one just send an email (either to team or just to boss as appropriate) with a quick description of the problem and how you solved it. No point doing good work if nobody's going to notice.

The are other pros. Maybe someone else is facing similar issue - communication may lead to collaboration in this case. If you communicate (early!) about some issues, mgmt has time to account for extra risks or delays.

So yeah, communication will get you promoted earlier than focusing on your tasks and keeping everything to yourself. I just cannot agree with the 10% for work and 90% for the communication ratio, that seems like way too much overhead. I think I would rather swap those numbers. Because how are you going to do anything meaningful if you work less than an hour a day?

I define "corporate" as any human org greater than 100 members, including non-profits, academia, military, even your damn scout troop.

Also: never communicate early. Communicate after you've solved the issue to look like a go-getter, avoid prolonged discussions and prevent people from taking credit. If you manage to take credit for someone else's hard work (say, if they're not a good communicator), all the better. That will help with maintaining a low work/politics ratio.

I'm actually writing a book about this.

Also, I'm planning for that book to have a slightly narrower focus, so I may have not done the project any justice.

I do have a lot of tech machiavellianism to write about though, from the small, but notable tech community in my country (Israel).

Do you think people would read this though? Maybe in blog form?

The approach you describe sounds like a piece of advise for someone who hates his job. So one would do as little as possible just not to get himself fired. Sounds like an awful position to be in.

Also, you seem to be content with being an individual contributor engineer, which is perfectly fine, but if you want to get ahead, you're not going about it the right way.