You Need to Break the Rules

This is a short one: over the course of your job, you are going to need to operate outside of the range of your defined permissions and responsibilities. You should do this sparingly and secretly. You should be able to operate outside of the system when you need to, and you need to know how to do it in non-obvious ways so you don’t get your escape hatches taken away from you.

Some benign examples of this:

• Occasionally merging a hotfix PR without code review
• Knowing a backdoor for read-only access to the prod database
• Being buddies with the devops team and being able to spin up new infra outside of roadmaps and plans

Operating 100% within the rules is career death: you will not be able to move the needle if you spend all of your effort coloring within the lines. Rule following or not, you will be laid off when things get bad. Nobody gets promoted for good behavior, they get promoted for being well-liked. Alternately, judicious application of breaking the rules, if the results are good, will not result in you losing your job (unless you are not popular).