5 ms·

Are you me? I spent the last 3 years completely redeveloping the foundation of our platform which will save the company millions of dollars a year. I didn't do

• MattGaiser 5y ago
  > I was convinced not to and am now putting my unlimited vacation to work. I'm 3 days into a month I'm taking off. So just quit after the vacation.
• e1g 5y ago
  It's a signal from the market ("employer") that what you currently offer is not what they currently value. If you desire greater rewards/ recognition, you need to discover what they value and decide if you want to offer that. Developers expect that work such as "refactoring", "platform architecture", "R&D", "investing into the future" has some intrinsic value to the business. At the company level, work such as "knowledge sharing", "upskilling the team", "fixing bugs for revenue-generating products", "reassuring management" can be more impactful given their current values and roadmap. You must choose whether to spend your energy working on your priorities or their priorities. Generally, you make more money if you help other people solve their problems rather than your problems. Or find new partnerships where the two sets overlap, but the highest-earning consultants can fall in love with solving the problems they do have, not the problems they wish they had.
  • whoknowswhat11 5y ago
    If you have a champion in mgmt things like "refactoring" or "platform architecture" can pay off. Please refactor this app off our oracle DB so we can say $10M - you will be fine and they may start slotting you into key business areas. If you are toiling doing platform, refactoring on a product without a ton of love - then yeah - that may be pretty low visibility for most folks.
    • e1g 5y ago
      Yes, priorities and values are malleable. A strategic worker can help the company understand that they have a previously unknown problem, demonstrate that it's bigger than some other priorities, and show how they can take accountability for fixing this problem. This is what a champion does, and you can be the champion for your own work. Either you help change priorities by educating others or update your own understanding of relative priorities based on that education. Doing this requires a different skillset from actually solving the problem, and anyone who can do both consistently will be fast-tracked in any direction they want.
    • PeterisP 5y ago
      Be the change you want to see the world - in quite a few big organizations, if you really believe that a major refactoring of a major project is needed, the only way that's going to happen is if you switch over from development to management and become that champion, enabling other people to implement it, and without that you'll never see it happen.
  • asimpletune 5y ago
    I agree with this 100%. Also, perhaps the work you did was super valuable, but the company is simply not equipped to understand things like this. A much more realistic understanding of how the company "sees" and "feels" is through its managers. Unfortunately, they are often detached from what actually matters to the company, or discouraged from swimming outside of their lane. So, in the end, it is unfortunately very common for your "value" to the company to be what your manager values, and it is all too often the case that what they value is not totally in alignment with what actually matters to the company's bottom line (like from the perspective of the C-suite/shareholders). This is obviously not the case for an early startup.
    • BizarroLand 5y ago
      To me it's like having no problem paying $40,000 to the carpenters who assembled your house but cursing the world when you have to pay the architect $10,000 for designing it. Shortsighted managers act like the 12 carpenters are doing all the "work" so they don't understand why 1 architect should get paid as much as 3 carpenters, never realizing the 12 carpenters wouldn't have a job without the architect.
  • rmk 5y ago
    This is true from anecdotal experience. However, what confuses things is that the "employer" simply doesn't know what it wants. The "employer" in this case is your immediate manager and, perhaps, a promotion committee that may include your peers. This set can have quite a bit of turnover in a company without good direction. The only constants that get recognized no matter the people (who may not have the ability or interest in evaluating technical contributions) are big talk, puffery, and unjustified confidence and optimism. Not to mention relentless positivity.
    • hinkley 5y ago
      One of the relentlessly positive leads, the one who keeps calling me out for being pessimistic, has been swinging from his own petard for the ~year for rushing out changes we can’t really reason about a priori and getting smacked with obscure-to-us corner cases and regressions that are customer visible. I don’t think he’s absorbed yet how much political capital he’s burned through. Both his own and the team’s. People are frustrated. But of course he wouldn’t notice, he’s an optimist and they don’t think about things like that.
      • abacadaba 5y ago
        sounds like management material to me
  • hinkley 5y ago
    What they value and what they need often are not in alignment, and only briefly come into alignment when something fails. You can either shop for another team that has its priorities straight, move on, or play games. Sometimes you have to develop a plan to fix something, and then not apply it until other people experience the pain themselves. Otherwise nobody knows how many land mines you’ve thrown yourself on. Games aside, it’s unfortunately part of delegation that they don’t fixate on what went well. They have other plates to keep spinning.
    • steveBK123 5y ago
      Sadly true.. From both a psychology & KPI perspective, an avoided unknown issue does not get the visibility of a quickly/competently resolved experienced issue. Sometimes one can be too proactive in this business.
  • eptcyka 5y ago
    I don't believe it's healthy to look at a single employee-employer relationship through the prism of market capitalism. Maybe they just need to get better at defending their work and be clearer to their management about what they expect.
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    > It's a signal from the market ("employer") that what you currently offer is not what they currently value. If you desire greater rewards/ recognition, you need to discover what they value and decide if you want to offer that. Is that really what it's signaling? "Need" and "salary" seem only loosely related.
• spoonjim 5y ago
  Avoid all work besides that which is likely to get your boss’ boss promoted.
  • asimpletune 5y ago
    Haha yes, basically just this.
  • mistrial9 5y ago
    when big tech company A was preparing for being sold, they brought in "my boss' boss" .. a woman new to the company. She promptly refused to meet with any rank and file engineer, at all, despite an arms long list of them wanting to meet. Secondly, she stopped showing up to her assigned office on the same floor as the engineers, where her predecessor had a glass-wall office overlooking the same working area.. Later, we found out that she was in fact inviting herself to any and all meetings she could get into, regarding the coming sale of the company.. it was a strategic move on her part to absolutely distance herself in every way from those doing work, and meet and become important to, officers in the company who will be part of the company sale. source: late 90s bay area california
• ryandrake 5y ago
  One thing I wish someone told me earlier in my career is that the skills and activities you need to perform to get promoted are totally different than the skills and activities you need to perform to get your job done, which by the way, are different than the skills and activities you need to perform in order to pass the interview and get hired. Not "related" or "complementary" to the job you are hired for--totally different. Promotion is about marketing. Getting your name in a favorable light in front of the deciders, and projecting an image of "someone who is like other people who we promote." Different companies do this differently. At some of them, it's about directly brown-nosing the higher-ups. At others it's about getting in the right cool-kid clique. At others it's about playing golf with key influencers or talking about sportsball with them in the lunch room. At others, who pretend to be merit based, it's about writing docs and "evidence" of your good work, but don't be fooled, those docs are marketing material, not technical evidence. Getting promoted is a separate job skill you need to learn, just like debugging and DevOps. Except it's a skill that does not benefit the company's bottom line at all. You have to set aside time and stop doing the work that you were hired for, stop solving the technical problems, and switch gears to doing the unrelated "getting promoted" work. Nobody in leadership or HR is going to explain it this way, of course. You kind of have to learn about it organically or listen to someone like me who had to learn it the hard way.
• bartread 5y ago
  > I tried to quit, but relented when I was convinced not to How did they convince you not to? Please tell me they have offered you something concrete and haven't just made empty promises or said nice things. (I'm running on the assumption the unlimited holiday you mentioned is company policy rather than something they've done just for you, so by "something concrete" I very specifically mean compensation - salary, bonus, maybe stock.)
  • HWR_14 5y ago
    It sounds very much like he decided to take a month vacation instead of quitting. He could still quit at the end of the month. Better to get paid to unwind and/or search for another job.
    • bartread 5y ago
      Oh, for sure. And I'd definitely take the opportunity to look around for something else if there's nothing more concrete on the table (and perhaps even if there is). I mean he now knows their real opinion of his value either way.
• sershe 5y ago
  I am currently learning that platform work in most places means nothing if you cannot point at an actual metric that management at appropriate level cares about, changing in a very tangible way; or unless your users are your peers, and you can be so good/promote yourself so well that your sheer reputation helps (and I'm not sure the latter even works in most places). I've actually previously worked at a platform team for a ton of internal customers, and then at a B2B startup selling platforms - that's where you get promoted for platform development, cause platform is the product and reducing request latency or whatever is something VPs care about... in my current team I have a long list of impactful (on platform level) improvements I could make to infrastructure and libraries, engineering fundamentals, etc... that I'm not doing, cause I'm doing some boring work that will move some number, or sitting in meetings with 3 teams trying to get out a feature, that customers (or management) care about for some strange reason ;) E.g. perf work only matters when we want to save on server budget, and we have to decide to save on it beforehand, and it still doesn't matter as much as shipping some new widget or a metric change. Or e.g. I created a library for X that ended up being used by a bunch of people in a few teams (not the original goal). I am pretty sure nobody above IC level cares. All I get for that are occasional bug reports and a perception that I might be an expert at X... if the library doesn't contribute to my career via the latter, there's no other way it will :)