7 ms·

I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. Technical debt can build up for myriad reasons not related much to competence. What I would sug

I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. Technical debt can build up for myriad reasons not related much to competence. What I would suggest is not to approach this situation as how you can wall off or otherwise attack this person but, instead as a life lesson on the importance of interpersonal relationships and politics. Politics are a fact of life. Humans are social creatures. All things being equal, and some ways even when not equal, those that are proficient in interpersonal relations will come out ahead. Grok that fact. There is no escape from it. Good. Now that unpleasantness is out of the way. On to how to cope. Scratch that, /thrive/, in an environment of people doing people things when you are a technical person. First, information. That is the lifeblood of many systems and politics is no different. Simply make sure important information is conveyed to the right people at the right time. You use the example that this fellow was able to take credit for your work. Had you passed the information of what you were doing and why it was important to the right people, he would have simply looked foolish to try to take credit. It can be uncomfortable, to toot your own horn, but it is necessary. Additionally, it can be important to the organization. Assuming you are creating value, it is important that decision-makers know that so they can make the correct decisions. Don't feel bad. Toot away. Building relationships is critically important in almost every human endeavor. Get good at it. It is a skill like any other. The target of your annoyance became a manager because he built up those skills and made it known. Build your skills and make it known. It is just that simple.

zldkz5 8y ago
Yes I agree with you, the point is that being technical person doing a technical job I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people. As I like to act first and share later, but there are people who talk but don't know how to act properly. I can build this skills as you said, true, but in my position now it would be impossible to get a promotion as the available spot has been taken already.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- Aeolun 8y ago
  Unless you can make the leadership recognize the greatness, there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works. Since you’re already in the position where you seem to lead the technical efforts of the team, where would you like to go from there?
  - JacKTrocinskI 8y ago
    There is a difference of course though and it's important to market to non-technical people that readable, maintainable, and tested code really does lead to lower costs for the company in the future.
  - zldkz5 8y ago
    > there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works. Unfortunately that's not true. If "shitty code that works" requires three days to be understood in order to make a small change that became a delivery issue and three days in a problem that can be solved in one hour are $$ that somebody is paying. In addition "shitty code that works" most of the time has scalability and performance issues sooner or later you need to address if you don't want it to implode. > where would you like to go from there? I can also keep staying in this position, I just don't like to have a manager that I'm not even proud of. And, by the way, I'd like to be in a position where decision making is more stronger also in a business perspective. There are a lot of ridiculous choices that some people makes that are not very effective in some ways let alone make data driven choices. As the organisations today claims to be "agile", most of the time they're not at all. They just use a new word but act as old school (long feedback-loop just to give you an example)
    - oblio 8y ago
      I had a cat. The cat would do stupid stuff while I was away and when I'd get home I'd get angry and smack the cat with a newspaper. Then someone told me: the cat is like a small kid: if you punish it after more than 5 minutes, it doesn't associate the punishment with the "crime". People outside your team won't understand your reasoning. They'll see code working one day and a random failure a long time after that, which might or might not be related to the previously working code. They're just like my cat. If you want to act for "shitty code", act before it's in production. Afterwards it's very hard to dislodge. And even harder to pinpoint the blame, as the author will definitely protect his back, ethically or not. I'd take the experience as a lesson in human interactions :)
- clavalle 8y ago
  >I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people. Nope. Silence is always less noticeable than noise. Evil prevails when good men do nothing. Also, nonsense fluff prevails when good work isn't spoken of. You have a professional duty to make sure nonsense is crowded out by important information. No one is going to do that for you. Follow the rule of three...tell people what you are going to do and why it is important. Tell people what you are doing. Tell people what you've done. And not just anybody; decision makers. It is no one else's job to tell people who influence your life of your good works. No one has time to dig through everything you might have done to hold up the shining examples of your work. And now you have someone above you that might actually be interested in seeing it kept buried so it is even more critical that you do that interpersonal information transfer yourself. You are a business, and like a business there is no worth in a product that the people who are in a position to buy don't know about. You're going to have to market and sell your value to the people that are buying. All of the time. Make it a habit. Your co-workers are competitors...don't expect them to sell your product for you. (though, keep in mind, part of your value-add is cooperating in your value-add chain so don't take this analogy too far). Honestly, this is stuff that took me way too long to learn. They should teach it in engineering school. Hell, they should teach it in secondary school, for that matter, since there is really no one who is not running a business even if it is a business of one.
  - La_Beffa 8y ago
    Cannot agree more, this is a life lesson that should be taught in school. Especially in medium/large companies where you got rewards like promotions, bonuses and so on, then your colleagues are competitors. Pretty much like politics, the one over promising and under delivering wins over the quiet one that delivers.
    - pitt1980 8y ago
      exactly how much to promise is an art form over promising and under delivering isn't a sustainable model under promising too much and you won't get the chance to deliver there's a sweet spot somewhere in there, which can be sometimes tricky to find
- kd0amg 8y ago
  I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people The value you create doesn't talk about you except to people who know you're the one who created it.
- pcpcpc 8y ago
  I've been reading a book on nonviolent communication[1]. It's been helping me rethink how I approach work conversations and communicate what I want. Putting it into practice has been tough, but early results have been good. I'm less likely to get angry, and while I still am not necessarily getting what I want all the time, I feel like I'm getting more clarity and direct communication around why not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
  - at_smith 8y ago
    What book?
    - pcpcpc 8y ago
      https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=sr_1_3 https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Lif...
- jondubois 8y ago
  The root problem is that there are too many idiots in management positions; they can't see through all the bullshit. Also, there are too many dumb investors; our entire global economy runs on dumb money. Don't waste your time trying to create value; let other people create the value and focus all your energy on capturing that value.
  - 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
    Ok, but ... How are we supposed to agree with your position when you waste time giving such valuable free advice?
    - cryptica 8y ago
      My background is value creation. I'm still new to value capturing. I have decades of bad habits to unlearn.
  - clavalle 8y ago
    When's the last time you went out of your way to discover if and how someone else has done well? Now, when's the last time you went out of your way to discover if and how someone screwed up? The difference is just how people are wired. We are all kind of dumb. As a fun exercise, track down someone responsible for having made your life better today, find out exactly how they did it and give them a piece of your mind about it.
- Devils_Avocado 8y ago
  I have spent my entire career in your area and can say with 1000% confidence that "the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people" is something that EVERYONE assumes to be true when they start but EVERYONE realises is 100% incorrect after a few years in the industry.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
deedubaya 8y ago
This is an excellent break down of OP's situation, which seems very common in tech. > make it known This was the hardest "part" of working in a company for me to understand and execute on, especially when reporting to a non-technical supervisor. The thing is they simply don't know where to look or what to lookout for to give us accolades. It isn't as hard as we make it out to be, either. It can be as simple as "I made the common components for the WidgetMaker uniform through out the system, increasing reliability and improving maintainability. This will help us avoid an outage during peak WidgetMaking season so we can continue to make Widgets and operate smoothly", which isn't at all horn-tooty, but gives credit where due.
- awaywopassd 8y ago
  Even technical managers have hard time understanding technology they are not familiar with.
jondubois 8y ago
If you can't beat them, join them. My current thinking is that the only way to make the world better is by helping to make it worse; things will not improve until there is total collapse so make it happen faster.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  "Let us do evil that good may result"? No thanks. And if you understood what total collapse will mean - the incredible human cost of it - you would not propose it even as a constructive step.
  - jondubois 8y ago
    >> the incredible human cost of it It's a cost I'm willing to accept... So long as that human is not me ;p
koonsolo 8y ago
Or short: It's not what you do, it's what people think you do.
- clavalle 8y ago
  Or: Don't expect people to read your mind or go searching for why you might be great. To understand why, ask yourself 'When's the last time I went out of my way to discover if someone else did well?'
zldkz5 8y ago
> I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. I was rushing trying to explain two years in a few words. You might not know what happened is such long span. To give you some ideas of why I said incompetence: - my colleague doesn't know yet how our infra works - he has no clue of the application architecture has he still make unforgettable mistakes after two years - in any architectural meeting where we have to discuss about something he got missed, and, when he's there, he will suggest an open source tool to do so even when it doesn't fit our needs - in any meeting when somebody ask something to him, the first answer would be "just go in google and search for a library to do x, z, y" even when the question is very architectural specific and domain specific - even after we implement something he still want to find an open source or SaaS to use for no reason, not understanding that we have a lot of integration cost that he doesn't even understand - he only had front-end (only in small-sized companies) experience and less than 6 years of total experience when he was hired (he joined right after me, I was not the interviewer) and he never lead a team before. I worker in multiple context during my career; mainly enterprise and consultancy and I had team leading experience before the role.

zldkz5 8y ago

Yes I agree with you, the point is that being technical person doing a technical job I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people. As I like to act first and share later, but there are people who talk but don't know how to act properly. I can build this skills as you said, true, but in my position now it would be impossible to get a promotion as the available spot has been taken already.

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Aeolun 8y ago
Unless you can make the leadership recognize the greatness, there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works. Since you’re already in the position where you seem to lead the technical efforts of the team, where would you like to go from there?
- JacKTrocinskI 8y ago
  There is a difference of course though and it's important to market to non-technical people that readable, maintainable, and tested code really does lead to lower costs for the company in the future.
- zldkz5 8y ago
  > there’s no difference between ridiculously shitty code that works, and beautiful, well-organized code that works. Unfortunately that's not true. If "shitty code that works" requires three days to be understood in order to make a small change that became a delivery issue and three days in a problem that can be solved in one hour are $$ that somebody is paying. In addition "shitty code that works" most of the time has scalability and performance issues sooner or later you need to address if you don't want it to implode. > where would you like to go from there? I can also keep staying in this position, I just don't like to have a manager that I'm not even proud of. And, by the way, I'd like to be in a position where decision making is more stronger also in a business perspective. There are a lot of ridiculous choices that some people makes that are not very effective in some ways let alone make data driven choices. As the organisations today claims to be "agile", most of the time they're not at all. They just use a new word but act as old school (long feedback-loop just to give you an example)
  - oblio 8y ago
    I had a cat. The cat would do stupid stuff while I was away and when I'd get home I'd get angry and smack the cat with a newspaper. Then someone told me: the cat is like a small kid: if you punish it after more than 5 minutes, it doesn't associate the punishment with the "crime". People outside your team won't understand your reasoning. They'll see code working one day and a random failure a long time after that, which might or might not be related to the previously working code. They're just like my cat. If you want to act for "shitty code", act before it's in production. Afterwards it's very hard to dislodge. And even harder to pinpoint the blame, as the author will definitely protect his back, ethically or not. I'd take the experience as a lesson in human interactions :)
clavalle 8y ago
>I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people. Nope. Silence is always less noticeable than noise. Evil prevails when good men do nothing. Also, nonsense fluff prevails when good work isn't spoken of. You have a professional duty to make sure nonsense is crowded out by important information. No one is going to do that for you. Follow the rule of three...tell people what you are going to do and why it is important. Tell people what you are doing. Tell people what you've done. And not just anybody; decision makers. It is no one else's job to tell people who influence your life of your good works. No one has time to dig through everything you might have done to hold up the shining examples of your work. And now you have someone above you that might actually be interested in seeing it kept buried so it is even more critical that you do that interpersonal information transfer yourself. You are a business, and like a business there is no worth in a product that the people who are in a position to buy don't know about. You're going to have to market and sell your value to the people that are buying. All of the time. Make it a habit. Your co-workers are competitors...don't expect them to sell your product for you. (though, keep in mind, part of your value-add is cooperating in your value-add chain so don't take this analogy too far). Honestly, this is stuff that took me way too long to learn. They should teach it in engineering school. Hell, they should teach it in secondary school, for that matter, since there is really no one who is not running a business even if it is a business of one.
- La_Beffa 8y ago
  Cannot agree more, this is a life lesson that should be taught in school. Especially in medium/large companies where you got rewards like promotions, bonuses and so on, then your colleagues are competitors. Pretty much like politics, the one over promising and under delivering wins over the quiet one that delivers.
  - pitt1980 8y ago
    exactly how much to promise is an art form over promising and under delivering isn't a sustainable model under promising too much and you won't get the chance to deliver there's a sweet spot somewhere in there, which can be sometimes tricky to find
kd0amg 8y ago
I thought that the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people The value you create doesn't talk about you except to people who know you're the one who created it.
pcpcpc 8y ago
I've been reading a book on nonviolent communication[1]. It's been helping me rethink how I approach work conversations and communicate what I want. Putting it into practice has been tough, but early results have been good. I'm less likely to get angry, and while I still am not necessarily getting what I want all the time, I feel like I'm getting more clarity and direct communication around why not. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonviolent_Communication
- at_smith 8y ago
  What book?
  - pcpcpc 8y ago
    https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Life-Changing-Relationships/dp/189200528X/ref=sr_1_3 https://www.amazon.com/Nonviolent-Communication-Language-Lif...
jondubois 8y ago
The root problem is that there are too many idiots in management positions; they can't see through all the bullshit. Also, there are too many dumb investors; our entire global economy runs on dumb money. Don't waste your time trying to create value; let other people create the value and focus all your energy on capturing that value.
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 8y ago
  Ok, but ... How are we supposed to agree with your position when you waste time giving such valuable free advice?
  - cryptica 8y ago
    My background is value creation. I'm still new to value capturing. I have decades of bad habits to unlearn.
- clavalle 8y ago
  When's the last time you went out of your way to discover if and how someone else has done well? Now, when's the last time you went out of your way to discover if and how someone screwed up? The difference is just how people are wired. We are all kind of dumb. As a fun exercise, track down someone responsible for having made your life better today, find out exactly how they did it and give them a piece of your mind about it.
Devils_Avocado 8y ago
I have spent my entire career in your area and can say with 1000% confidence that "the value that I create will talk more than the nonsense of some people" is something that EVERYONE assumes to be true when they start but EVERYONE realises is 100% incorrect after a few years in the industry.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

deedubaya 8y ago

This is an excellent break down of OP's situation, which seems very common in tech. > make it known This was the hardest "part" of working in a company for me to understand and execute on, especially when reporting to a non-technical supervisor. The thing is they simply don't know where to look or what to lookout for to give us accolades. It isn't as hard as we make it out to be, either. It can be as simple as "I made the common components for the WidgetMaker uniform through out the system, increasing reliability and improving maintainability. This will help us avoid an outage during peak WidgetMaking season so we can continue to make Widgets and operate smoothly", which isn't at all horn-tooty, but gives credit where due.

awaywopassd 8y ago
Even technical managers have hard time understanding technology they are not familiar with.

jondubois 8y ago

If you can't beat them, join them. My current thinking is that the only way to make the world better is by helping to make it worse; things will not improve until there is total collapse so make it happen faster.

AnimalMuppet 8y ago
"Let us do evil that good may result"? No thanks. And if you understood what total collapse will mean - the incredible human cost of it - you would not propose it even as a constructive step.
- jondubois 8y ago
  >> the incredible human cost of it It's a cost I'm willing to accept... So long as that human is not me ;p

koonsolo 8y ago

Or short: It's not what you do, it's what people think you do.

clavalle 8y ago
Or: Don't expect people to read your mind or go searching for why you might be great. To understand why, ask yourself 'When's the last time I went out of my way to discover if someone else did well?'

zldkz5 8y ago

> I never heard anything about incompetence in your description. I was rushing trying to explain two years in a few words. You might not know what happened is such long span. To give you some ideas of why I said incompetence: - my colleague doesn't know yet how our infra works - he has no clue of the application architecture has he still make unforgettable mistakes after two years - in any architectural meeting where we have to discuss about something he got missed, and, when he's there, he will suggest an open source tool to do so even when it doesn't fit our needs - in any meeting when somebody ask something to him, the first answer would be "just go in google and search for a library to do x, z, y" even when the question is very architectural specific and domain specific - even after we implement something he still want to find an open source or SaaS to use for no reason, not understanding that we have a lot of integration cost that he doesn't even understand - he only had front-end (only in small-sized companies) experience and less than 6 years of total experience when he was hired (he joined right after me, I was not the interviewer) and he never lead a team before. I worker in multiple context during my career; mainly enterprise and consultancy and I had team leading experience before the role.