be noticed and promoted is one big fat illusion more often than not kept alive by manipulative managers wanting to get extra free hours from us (so that THEY get fat bonuses)
The resentment of management is so thick in this forum you could cut it with a knife.
The mid-level manager gains from promoting successful people up the corporate ladder. Managers are graded on their ability to build an effective team and recruit/develop high performing talent. An effective manager knows to provide the top people with the tools and environment they need to do their best. While it is true that the promotion carrot is often dangled to push someone harder, only a lousy manager believes they can dangle carrots without coming through on their end. We have an engineer on the team right now who was told he'd get a promotion if he took the role of lead engineer on a recent project and succeeded. He worked hard, impressed his teammates with his skill and ethic, and earned the promotion. That is no illusion. He was given an opportunity and he took it.
You've observed that outgoing type A's get noticed and are promoted more frequently than technical experts. I do agree with this (to some extent) having seen that the road to "Staff Engineer" is longer than the road to "Engineering Manager". There are basically two career paths for engineers: technical and management. The technical path is ascended by demonstrating technical expertise, the ability to guide large scale projects from the technical side, and the ability to mentor less experienced engineers. The quiet and reserved person can and will ascend through this path by demonstrating their technical ability, and accomplishing this takes years of good work. A quiet and reserved person who is also skilled at mentoring young engineers is perhaps more promotable due to the high demand and greater contribution a mentor can bring to the organization. On the management path, outgoing individuals tend to be noticed more for their management potential. A large part of a manager's job is working with other managers and reporting to executives, the majority of which are themselves open and outgoing. Likewise, a successful manager needs to be able to effectively work with people of varied personalities, some of which reserved people find reprehensible. On a similar note, negotiating for pay also demonstrates a skill a manager needs to have. The manager is graded on their ability to negotiate to get the best value for the company and not having the ability to negotiate will hurt their chances of being successful managers. For these reasons, outgoing people shining a light on their work are showing skills of a different sort, and may be promotable based partly on that display which you regard as purely superficial.
When a person earns a senior technical position, it is reasonably certain that they will succeed in this appointment. They can succeed in these positions for many years and have great careers all the way up to retirement, all the while mentoring the next batch of experts. On the other hand, when a person earns a management position, there is no guarantee that they will succeed, and most of them will probably fail (perhaps by committing the ills you've indicated in your post). Then they will either leave or be canned, opening positions for the next batch of potential managers. This is one driving reason for outgoing people to be more frequently promoted.
My advice would be for a person to examine what it is they want out of their career. "Success" doesn't equate to happiness, and if you've sacrificed your personality in efforts to gain pay, you have little chance at happiness in your career. If you aren't going to claim credit for everything based on your principles and your personality, then by all means stick with your principles a go about quietly getting the job done. In a well-functioning organization, real accomplishments do not go unnoticed, and there will always be a place for unassuming technical experts.
