4 ms·
It took me a decade of work to realize that in corporate America you are almost always paid for being nice and helpful to your colleagues, rather than your indi
by deanmoriarty 5y ago
It took me a decade of work to realize that in corporate America you are almost always paid for being nice and helpful to your colleagues, rather than your individual contributions, no matter what level you are hired at. And this becomes more and more true as a company scales in number of employees (currently at a FAANG and couldn't be more true).
For me personally it was a major shift that occurred over a couple years transformation. Before:
- I used to be extremely dogmatic about my thinking, would get into "fights" over adopting the perfect technical solutions (i.e. API design, specific ways of writing a component, ...). I was insufferable at times.
- I would find, honestly, a bit of pleasure at explicitly shutting down other people ideas, always in a polite-but-clearly-condescending way, bonus if in public with senior leaders in the room.
- I would generally not help people, thinking that if I did my relevance as technical expert would diminish. Very territorial behavior. When directly asked a question, I would typically reply as ambiguously as possible.
I don't remember what caused it, but I did a 180 degrees shift at some point based on the mantra "I am paid for being nice" and:
- I am genuinely nice in meetings. I always cheer people up, and if I see a suboptimal idea, I never ever belittle the person who suggests it, and start asking very polite and respectful questions (almost always in a private conversation to avoid "public" grilling) until the other person naturally sees the point I was trying to make. If the other person is not receptive to the engagement, I drop it quickly. It is not the end of the world if a mistake will be made as a result of a suboptimal idea, and I could always be proved wrong.
- When a person asks me for some quick help, it is common for me to thoroughly answer and then also offer a full 1-2 hours meeting and explain them everything I know about that area, including potential insights about the future. I still have a tiny bit of “cockiness” from my old days, enough that people don’t abuse my very open attitude to help.
I had to change company to pull off this transformation, because my reputation as "extremely smart and extremely productive brilliant jerk" was too ingrained in my old one, but I am generally happier now. I think most coworkers would describe me as "Helpful and generally competent guy, easy to talk to". I like that.
I can see many "old me" coworkers around, it is truly sad to witness and I can't believe I used to be like that.
- Dracophoenix 5y agoDo you get embarrassing flashbacks of previous behavior or any pangs of worry that you'll regress? Have you ever tried nudge those "old versions of you" towards your current direction?
- llampx 5y agoNot brilliant and highly productive any more?
- deanmoriarty 5y agoNo. Mostly because I am now at a FAANG and the quality of engineers is much better than previously (large not-so-interesting Bay Area startups that get the quality of engineers they can afford to pay, aka well below FAANG), so it is more difficult to stand out. And the few times I could stand out by making insightful observations in front of senior leaders, it is just not worth it and prefer to let team mates take the lead. I am truly happy being an averagely productive team member, my main goals in life are now towards reaching financial freedom in a few years, and with some luck I am on track even without swinging for the fences on the career side. Senior engineers at FAANG are paid unbelievably well.
- sillysaurusx 5y agoI wish everyone on HN had these same realizations. Both your comments are gold, almost literally. And people would be much happier to go into software dev with realistic expectations. I would’ve been.
- jelan 5y agoIt takes a lot of self reflection and maturity to realize mistakes we’ve made in the past, so thank you for sharing this about your career. I’m wondering if you felt forced out of the company where your reputation was a brilliant hard to work with jerk? I’ve worked with people like this before and unless the company culture is set up to reward this kind of behavior from the top down, this always ends in said person being worked around and given less and less responsibility and slowly managed out no matter how brilliant they are. This almost always happens in the polite Silicon Valley way of getting rid of people where no one gets fired and everyone just smiles and works around you until you leave due to “incompetent team members” or “work not challenging anymore”, especially at start up’s who really don’t have the time or money to deal with wrongful termination lawsuits. Not implying that this is what happened to you, but more so wondering if you felt this at all or it was just self realization that prompted your move and behavior change?
- deanmoriarty 5y agoI did not feel forced out, actually management tried to convince me to stay with a pretty compelling counter offer. I knew I was stuck in a rot of most coworkers and management seeing me as this “brilliant but unapproachable authority”, and I wanted to start fresh in a new place with humbleness. Much easier to do in a new company. I know what you mean and I have seen other people being managed out of the company with smiles, via gradual marginalization and removal of responsibilities. If I had to guess why that happened to them is because they were “more jerk, less brilliant”, in my case it was slightly the opposite as my contributions happened to be really significant for that company.