If your boss really is dillusional and thinks they are doing all the work themselves then you’re SOL.

Either way the key is your boss having to recognize and reward you for making them look good. If they don’t recognize your effort then it’s all for naught.

Luckily for me, making my boss look good is a pleasure because I like my boss and get along. I know that if I create value for him when he reports to his bosses, then why on earth would he want to get rid of me? Why would you want to get rid of someone that’s creating value for you?

If your boss sucks it’s a lot more complicated and it may be tough to do things that you may not get “credit for.” But that’s the rub.

The other option is to do nothing and see if you keep your job. Good luck with that.

Frequently, employees who have been fired have no idea that they were so focused on doing what they wanted that their actions hurt clients and co-workers and ultimately made the boss look bad. This is not a question of blindly following the boss; it is actually the action of looking at the whole situation, watching for what the boss might not have seen and keeping him or her from being blindsided by problems that you can resolve or alert the boss to. Teamwork involves being less focused on making yourself look good and more focused on keeping the organization productive.

“Making the boss look good” is a reminder that making yourself look good is not always best for your company. If you focus on making yourself look good at the expense of the boss, co-workers, or clients, you are ultimately placing yourself in a position to be fired.

I think an immediate manager doesn’t have firing or hiring power in most large corporations.

To get hired in my corporation, you need to be interviewed by a number of people – some managers some not and everyone evaluates you based on your skills, knowledge, creativity, abilities, etc (a bunch of other things I don’t remember). Then everything goes into a system and someone else (HR? Director? – I don’t even know who) makes a final decision. Normally, there has to be no negatives and most of those who interview have to be strongly for.

As to firing, an immediate manager can influence what kind of evaluation one gets but not a complete control over it: we are graded on a curve with everyone compared to everyone else in an organization (up to the 4th level) based on one’s accomplishments during the year. The manager can help with some aspects: – help with writing a short summary of accomplishments, getting right projects for his or her group, offering suggestions during the year; the manager also has an input during the meetings where the managers get together to create one sorted list of everyone. Up to some level; at some level it’s higher level managers who do the merging. A couple of months later, the grade comes back. Two times of “needs improvement” evaluation (bottom 5%) in a row means “show immediate improvement” or you are fired. But, of course, there is always bottom 5% no matter how great everyone is. I work in research, a world class research center, actually, and we don’t have stupid people or lazy people – these were fired 5 years ago.

During layoffs, those in bottom 5% are usually at greatest risk, but simply having good evaluation doesn’t guarantee safety. At least as the last round of layoffs showed. This was actually the scariest part – in addition to those in bottom 5% (some of whom are very good just had a not-so-great year) and complete groups being cut, there was a number of firings which were just bizarre.

As to if I’d want you as my manager. Where I work, success of a project is what makes a manager look good as well as accomplishments of the employees themselves, so I have no problems with that. But, I am not sure you have the skills necessary to be a good manager in my organization. Besides, unless you have a PhD in CS, you have very little chance of getting the job, at least in my division of the company. We do have a legal department that mostly deals with intellectual property, and as far as I know they lost people too. Not sure of the criteria used in legal.

Regarding Microsoft, it sounds like the boss in question did not have hiring/firing power which makes it tough to protect yourself. We only have one layer of management in our business so your ability to survive and thrive is highly dependent on making your boss look good.