The Game at Work

At some point during my first year working, I realized something uncomfortable.

I wasn’t engineering anymore. I was performing.

Like many other juniors, my focus shifted from the work itself to the person evaluating it. The goal quietly became one thing: get that feeling of validation from your manager. That warm signal that says you belong here, you’re doing well, you’re safe.

And I hadn’t noticed it happening. That’s the thing.

Corporate structures are society in miniature. Pyramids, hierarchies, status games, ladders. Your manager controls your ranking. They decide if you move up or stay where you are. They hold the key to the next level of the game. So the temptation to perform entirely for them isn’t a personal weakness. It’s structurally built into the system. It’s an emergent property of the architecture. In some organizations, it’s even deliberate.

The system wants you to perform for your manager. That’s how it maintains control.

And the cost is real.

When someone else becomes the reference point for your worth, your inner life becomes hostage to their moods, their preferences, their insecurities, their own games. You’ve handed the authorship of your internal state to someone who wasn’t asking for it and probably doesn’t deserve it.

You stop working and start managing perception.

The actual engineering, the problem solving, the craft, all of it becomes secondary to how it’s being received. And that’s corrosive. Because you got into this for the engineering.

The impact isn’t just psychological discomfort. It makes you worse at the thing you’re supposed to be doing. Anxiety about perception consumes the exact cognitive resources that genuine thinking requires.

The engineer trying to solve a problem and the engineer anxious about the perception of his work are not the same person. And they produce completely different work.

So what changed for me?

Not the structure. The structure didn’t change. The hierarchy is still there, the manager still holds the ranking, and the game is still running.

What changed was my mindset.

I started to adopt the mindset of a top engineer: someone who identifies as a problem solver, someone genuinely interested in their craft, someone who actually cares about their work and holds themselves to a high standard.

This is the internal reference; it doesn’t depend on anyone’s validation. The manager’s opinion becomes a data point rather than the verdict.

And paradoxically, that makes you more impressive to managers anyway, because people who work from genuine personal standards have a quality of presence, confidence, and ownership that others simply don’t.

So be obsessed with your craft, produce high-quality work, and keep your reference internal.

Hope this helps.

Jules Nembot