So instead of working hard at your tasks, you worked hard at playing your manager. Seems like a “law of conservation of working hard” to me; you just needed the right kind of working hard.

>worked hard at playing your manager

No. Instead of working until my head exploded (and my manager telling me I wasn’t showing “a sense of urgency”) I focused on doing the right thing, and part of that is helping your manager succeed.

I'd once heard a piece of advice that was along the lines of "regardless of what it may say the duties are on paper your actual job is to make your manager look smart for having you on the team"

Would you be able to share some tips or sources on managing your manager? It sounds like a really valuable skill

I had a similar realization, but it’s not really about working hard vs. not working hard, it’s about knowing what’s important to your manager. Early in my career I would never say no to any task, and would give the time estimate I thought the manager wanted, and then work over time to get it done. Half the time the finished product had bugs, got delivered too late, or ended up not matching what the client wanted, so the “hard work” didn’t translate directly into success. Now I try to figure out what the client’s actual needs are and how to meet them as quickly and with as little work as possible, and when something is requiring overtime, I immediately stop working on it and communicate that it’s a bigger issue than expected, and either push the project, get additional engineers, or find a different way to solve the issue. I think programmers really enjoy solving problems and we never like to admit that something is more difficult than we expected because we feel like we failed, but actually that’s just an expected part of the job. Obviously this only works if you have a good manager who actually cares about results. Bad managers are easy to manipulate because you just optimize for whatever BS metric they’ve decided is important, but those jobs are soul crushing.

https://www.notion.so/Manage-your-manager-26a26b82bd824f97bf... found this link on HN a while back but never really put it into practice. could be useful could not

seconding the request on 'Tips for Managing your Manager'.

As long there's a common understanding of the goal of the company it's easy. The tricky part is to get the manager to manage the upstream managers and across departments.