How did you work hard? What kind of career did you choose? What was your budget like? Did you have any bad luck re health or family? There's many possible reasons, many under your control, some not. Should I assume based on your response and the original article, by hard work you mean not just effort on the job, but also effort in finding work you align with, explored other job types, spent real effort networking, studied for job skills a bunch, and didn't have any bad luck to explain it?
Good grades, got a job I thought was good at the time, great grades in a masters program (expanded network outside the company), became an expert at my company, filled a role on the team 1-2 levels above mine. Then got denied promotions based on political games and contrary to policy, more ignored policy to my detriment, even worked a second job for a while, outsourced my team, forced to switch to even less known tech, etc etc. Got AWS and financial certs, filled a role above my grade (again), more politics, more violation of policy to my detriment, etc etc. No other good job options in this area, wife won't relocate, multiple family health issues in the past year and family commitments (ie my wife walks all over me now that we have a kid) that prevent me from throwing in extra hours, not that I feel much reason to based on past treatment when I used to do that.
Budget has always been very frugal. I make my own cheap beer/wine, make soap, grow food in a garden, almost never take vacations (honeymoon was the only expensive one), cook 99% of the time at home, etc.
You can't trust companies to keep their word. Working hard gets you no where. The greedy people at the top are the ones who get everything and will screw you over constantly. And I'm not even talking about success in terms of $200k+ salary and fancy titles like CTO etc. I'm just talking about success as making it to the natural progression of senior dev and techlead with a salary over $100k.
But I must be a loser who didn't work hard since other people made it.
But even that isn't necessarily true. I know of several managers who didn't work hard to get there. Theh were just in the right place at the right time, or in some cases the right gender.
We can abstract this a little. You don't have to work hard. You just have to appear useful to the people in power.
I worked hard in the past. I'm not working hard now - I'm really slacking now that I know I'm screwed. I'm still getting paid the same.
