You’re being sarcastic, but I think you’d be surprised at how often you can say no to managers or even VPs and the c-suite and … have nothing happen to you.

I didn’t realize this until I was 32.

Obviously some companies will actually punish you. You might get fired from your Amazon or Microsoft job, for instance.

But typically what happens is the work just gets offloaded to another yes-man.

And the funny thing with promotions is most orgs don’t reward work volume. Nobody will remember that you took 11pm meetings or did that one unpleasant migration nobody wanted to do anyways.