Am I right in guessing you've worked for smallish organizations? I've seen some amazing programmers promoted, mostly as a mechanism to pay them more. I've even seen one forced to quit after not accepting repeated promotion attempts.
IMHO the single most important advice for any hacker who wants to be happy is to avoid large organizations, even Google. Large organizations are the plague, a small company is good medicine, and your own startup is the cure.
IMHO the single most important advice for any hacker who wants to be happy is to avoid large organizations, even Google. Large organizations are the plague, a small company is good medicine, and your own startup is the cure.