The Slack notification shimmers in the periphery of my vision, a tiny, malevolent star. It’s 1:47 PM. I don’t need to click it. I already know from the sudden, dead quiet in the team channel, a silence that has more weight and texture than any sound. The announcement is up. Daniel is the new Senior Lead.

A wave of something hot and acidic floods my chest, a familiar sticktail of indignation and confusion. Daniel is… fine. He’s a perfectly adequate Senior Analyst. He completes his tickets. He smiles on Zoom calls. But his code is serviceable at best, his insights are lukewarm repetitions of things our director said last quarter, and I have personally untangled his technical messes on at least 17 different occasions. Meanwhile, I’m the one who shipped the transaction engine rewrite-a project that took 237 hours of late nights-that is currently saving the company an estimated $77,777 a month. The project that got a polite nod in a sprint review and then vanished from memory.

But Daniel, he understands the real work. His calendar isn’t a neat grid of focused tasks; it’s a chaotic mosaic of ‘Coffee Chats’ and ‘Syncs’ and ‘Touchpoints’. He is a master of the soft update, the casual check-in, the perfectly timed GIF in the #random channel that makes an executive laugh. He doesn’t just do the work; he performs the idea of the work in the places where the right people are watching. He’s fluent in the language they don’t teach you, the one spoken in hallway conversations and after-hours drinks. He didn’t just get a promotion; he aced the final exam of the hidden curriculum.

The Illusion of the Clean Slate

I used to be obsessed with the idea of a clean slate. I met a woman once, Bailey A.-M., whose job was literally creating them. She ran a specialized graffiti removal service. She explained her process with the precision of a chemist, talking about solvents and pressure gradients and the ghosting effect left by certain pigments on porous brick. Her goal, she said, was not just to remove the unwanted paint but to restore the surface so completely that no one could ever tell anything had been there. A perfect, undeniable reset. For years, I thought that’s what good work was: a clean, elegant solution so perfect it erased the problem that came before it.

“

“The work should speak for itself, I insisted. The sheer quality of the output should be enough.”

This is the biggest mistake I ever made in my career. Believing that competence was a self-evident truth, that merit was a currency that spent the same way in every room. It isn’t.

And if you’re not going to be that for your own work, you’d better hope someone else is. I wasn’t. So I’d deliver my perfectly clean walls while others were hanging gallery labels next to their smudges, explaining the profound artistic intent behind them.

Navigating the Hidden Curriculum

This hidden curriculum is the corporate equivalent of a secret society. It has its own rituals, its own coded language. You learn, for instance, that the 30-minute meeting on the calendar is just a formality to ratify a decision that was actually made in a 7-minute pre-meeting between two key people. You learn that a project’s success is determined less by its ROI and more by its proximity to the CEO’s pet initiative. You learn who the unofficial nodes of information are-the people who aren’t on the org chart but hold all the institutional knowledge and social capital. It’s a game of navigating invisible power structures, and it has almost nothing to do with the skills listed on your resume.

I used to hate this. I saw it as a corrupt, inefficient system that rewarded politicians over producers. And it is. Let me be clear, this system is deeply flawed and is a primary driver of the biases that plague our industries. It favors those who are already comfortable with the codes of corporate power, who went to the right schools, who look and sound like the people already in charge. It creates a shadow workforce of people-often women, people of color, and introverts-doing exceptional work that goes unrecognized because they’re too busy doing their actual jobs to play the visibility game.

Playing the Game to Change It

And yet, I am going to tell you that you have to learn to play. This is the contradiction I’ve had to swallow, the bitter pill. You cannot fix a game you refuse to understand. Railing against it from the outside changes nothing. You have to learn the rules to earn the right to rewrite them. This means mapping the social network of your organization. It means finding a sponsor, not just a mentor-someone who will not only give you advice but will actively advocate for you in the rooms you’re not in. It means getting comfortable with articulating your own value, repeatedly, without sounding like a jerk. It is exhausting and it is unfair.

Part of the problem is how information itself is wielded as a currency. Critical context is often locked in dense, 47-page strategy documents that only 7% of the company will ever read. The people who have the time and inclination to parse these tomes become the gatekeepers of strategic direction. But what if that information were more accessible? What if a leader’s complex quarterly plan could be broken down and disseminated in a way that anyone could absorb during their commute or while making lunch? The tools to do this exist. For instance, using an ia que transforma texto em podcast can democratize that high-level thinking, turning a wall of text that protects the status quo into a shared understanding that empowers everyone. When everyone knows the ‘why’, it gets a lot harder to hide behind jargon and closed-door meetings.

Making the implicit explicit is the only way to start leveling the playing field. It’s about replacing the secret handshake with a public bulletin board.

The Messy, Collaborative Mural

Let’s go back to Bailey, the graffiti remover. Her job is satisfying because it’s tangible. The wall is either clean or it isn’t. There’s no ambiguity. Our work in these complex organizations is the opposite. It is a constant exercise in interpreting shadows, in trying to make our contributions visible on a surface that is constantly being painted over by others. Success is not a clean wall.

There is no magic solvent that can wash away a company’s culture or its hidden rules. There is no perfect reset. There is only the slow, difficult work of understanding the system as it is, and then using that knowledge to nudge it, ever so slightly, toward what it ought to be. It’s about learning the language of power not just to serve yourself, but to one day translate it for everyone else who has been left out of the conversation.