The modern workplace is an extension of social media culture.

We broadcast to show the best of ourselves. The loudest are those who claim the glory and the promotions. The more you share, the more people form an impression of you.

Silent work, quiet work—even if it's the highest-value work—is not what gets you promoted. It's not what keeps you safe from firing. Broadcasting your victories is what does that.

Someone can have fewer victories than you. But if a tree falls in the forest and no one's there to hear it... does it make a sound? In the world of startups and corporate life, it doesn't.

tough news for the quiet ones

This is hard for introverts. For those who prefer to do the work rather than talk about the work.

But perhaps the reframe is that storytelling is part of the job. Getting agreement and shared understanding of the value you deliver—that's a unifying property in an organization. It's how alignment happens.

You may not agree with the mechanism. Some Slack message with a photo of you doing the work. Sharing your achievements from a recent project in a team meeting. I'm not a fan either. But that modality is what gets rewarded. It's part of the job now.

philosopher vs. pragmatist

On one hand, I'm a philosophical critic. This new age way of broadcasting has a certain level of toxicity—symptomatic of collectively shattered attention, a wayward unconsciousness about doing deep work.

On the other hand, I just ran the experiment.

I did three intensive weeks of customer on-sites. Exhausting work. When I came back, I wrote thorough, detailed notes—shared them with my team. Long, exhaustive, checking all the boxes. People probably didn't read it. And when I returned? Hardly a blink.

Meanwhile, a colleague posts a few pictures from their on-site. Explicitly says it was amazing. Shares a few snippets. Slack goes wild with praise emojis. Company celebrates them. They become a golden child in the organization.

The contrast was harsh.

So I started an experiment. This week, I did a much simpler on-site—not nearly as intensive or valuable as the ones before. But this time, I broadcasted it. Shared some photos. Told the story.

The accolades started rolling in. People recognized me. Colleagues came up to ask how I run client conversations. I could feel the reputational shift happening in real time.

It's too soon to say how much this changes things long-term. But the pattern is clear: nobody has time to properly assess you. Your manager asks peers to assess you. Your peers base their impression on what you share—on whatever internal social media equivalent your organization runs.

Nobody has time to look at the actual work you've done. They don't evaluate progress or decide what progress even means. They form impressions from snippets—the same way you form impressions of someone's life from their Instagram posts.

So the more you broadcast, the more people notice. That's just how it works.

But as a pragmatist, I hesitate to let my inner philosopher take the wheel. When your goal is to grow in a company, it's easier to use the levers you know work than to try changing the culture. You will almost certainly fail to change a culture.

Perhaps the answer is holding both: awareness of the game and its pitfalls, while playing to achieve your goals.

And if the game neither meets your goals nor your values? You can always choose a different one.