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I cannot agree with this enough. I'm 29 years old now, so not particularly old but not 21 anymore. When I was 16 working as a concert promoter all the hard work

I cannot agree with this enough. I'm 29 years old now, so not particularly old but not 21 anymore. When I was 16 working as a concert promoter all the hard working musicians from my middle of nowhere home town in Canada became successful, either in the music industry or in another industry. I'm still friends with people I let sleep on my floor during those times. On the tech side I've stayed late to help push projects through. People don't forget. I have friends from 7+ years ago, some who's weddings I've stood at. We _still_ talk about the time we made a miracle happen and got the project out the door the night before. We _still_ talk about the time production went down in front of 1,000,000 users and we rage coded a solution together. Compound interest works with relationships just like it works with money. Real trust builds over years. I've been the tag along for a few projects now that I never would have found without being friendly and helpful in the past.

Consultant32452 6y ago
>Compound interest works with relationships just like it works with money. This is a really great way of putting it because compound interest also works on social debt (being a dick). Build up a lot of it, and you won't go anywhere.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  It can get you to the oval office, so I guess ymmv
- jameshush 6y ago
  Hahahaha, I almost spit out my coffee reading this. I never thought about it that way but it's so true! The only thing worse than credit card debit is the compound interest of social debt. And social debt spills over to other circles! There's been times where someone's applied to a job I've worked at and I've noticed they worked at a previous company with a mutual past colleague. I've texted the colleague and asked "Hey, so and so's applied here. What was your experience with them?". Oftentimes it's "Oh so and so's great! We made some miracles happen at HerpDerp Co." but every once in a while I'll get back "So and so is fine." or in a few situations "Honestly So and so was a good engineer but was absolutely terrible to work with on a team. Very negative to other people". It's a small world!
giantDinosaur 6y ago
Are you actually earning more and objectively better off in economic/status terms by doing this? I ask because another common failure mode with getting stuck is to essentially 'rage code' into working free overtime and accepting bad conditions all because of the camaraderie i.e. someone is exploiting the positive characteristics of bonding. If it matches with your goals, that's fine, but often people look back and realise they were essentially exploited in this way (see: team-building exercises in a lot of minimum-wage style jobs to see a pure & distilled form of this kind of thing.) Perhaps just something to be aware of! I don't mean to be overly negative, so apologies in advance if I've gotten a completely wrong impression here, but I do believe the general risk of this failure mode in career/life exists and is common.
- jameshush 6y ago
  I rage coded in my early 20's, you're right, it doesn't work :) Made some buddies out of it but more importantly it gave me the absolute feeling of panic and respect that a system CAN and WILL go down in production in front of customers if you don't get the operations side perfect. That fear drove me to get great at operations. Now I've made a reputation as the person who can enter a dumpster fire project that's always behind and breaking and change it to a project that the whole team can deploy at 5:00pm on a Friday, close their laptops, go home and play with their kids and rarely get paged. A more concrete example is I did great work at one company for 2.5 years then followed my boss when he quit to another company for a significant raise and title bump. The best part was even though it was a new job, I had 2.5 years worth of trust equity with my boss, so I could push new ideas through to the rest of the org through him without having to spend months building trust with a new boss first.

Consultant32452 6y ago

>Compound interest works with relationships just like it works with money. This is a really great way of putting it because compound interest also works on social debt (being a dick). Build up a lot of it, and you won't go anywhere.

ithkuil 6y ago
It can get you to the oval office, so I guess ymmv
jameshush 6y ago
Hahahaha, I almost spit out my coffee reading this. I never thought about it that way but it's so true! The only thing worse than credit card debit is the compound interest of social debt. And social debt spills over to other circles! There's been times where someone's applied to a job I've worked at and I've noticed they worked at a previous company with a mutual past colleague. I've texted the colleague and asked "Hey, so and so's applied here. What was your experience with them?". Oftentimes it's "Oh so and so's great! We made some miracles happen at HerpDerp Co." but every once in a while I'll get back "So and so is fine." or in a few situations "Honestly So and so was a good engineer but was absolutely terrible to work with on a team. Very negative to other people". It's a small world!

giantDinosaur 6y ago

Are you actually earning more and objectively better off in economic/status terms by doing this? I ask because another common failure mode with getting stuck is to essentially 'rage code' into working free overtime and accepting bad conditions all because of the camaraderie i.e. someone is exploiting the positive characteristics of bonding. If it matches with your goals, that's fine, but often people look back and realise they were essentially exploited in this way (see: team-building exercises in a lot of minimum-wage style jobs to see a pure & distilled form of this kind of thing.) Perhaps just something to be aware of! I don't mean to be overly negative, so apologies in advance if I've gotten a completely wrong impression here, but I do believe the general risk of this failure mode in career/life exists and is common.

jameshush 6y ago
I rage coded in my early 20's, you're right, it doesn't work :) Made some buddies out of it but more importantly it gave me the absolute feeling of panic and respect that a system CAN and WILL go down in production in front of customers if you don't get the operations side perfect. That fear drove me to get great at operations. Now I've made a reputation as the person who can enter a dumpster fire project that's always behind and breaking and change it to a project that the whole team can deploy at 5:00pm on a Friday, close their laptops, go home and play with their kids and rarely get paged. A more concrete example is I did great work at one company for 2.5 years then followed my boss when he quit to another company for a significant raise and title bump. The best part was even though it was a new job, I had 2.5 years worth of trust equity with my boss, so I could push new ideas through to the rest of the org through him without having to spend months building trust with a new boss first.