Comment by rjdagost

There is a great quote in the post: "Incremental improvements just annoy people and are, at best, neutral for your career."

Working for several different Fortune 500 companies this has been my experience many times. I have worked on products where I made a large number of incremental improvements that never got incorporated into the released product. Taken on their own the improvements don't change things much, but in the aggregate they make a significantly better product. Why didn't most of my incremental improvements get incorporated into the product? Every change, no matter how minor, is perceived by management to be a highly risky proposition. Product managers won't get promoted because the product is 4% better, but they could potentially get fired if that same incremental improvement had an unforeseen negative consequence.

Once the short term sales mindset gets power, hit products are viewed as cows to be milked and not as things that need continued maintenance and improvement. As an engineer in such an enterprise you watch helplessly as your competitors slowly but steadily pass you, and then someday upper management wonders why the magic money machine broke down. Some large enterprises avoid this fate but they seem to be the exception.