9 ms·

You have two jobs (2017)

59 points by ColinWright 5y ago

ziggus 5y ago
If you're new to the 'professional' working world, then I can understand a lack of conformance with the norms of those environments. However, if you've been working in professional environments for a while, there's no excuse for not understanding those norms and why they exist, short of some kind of cognitive differences.
- jpitz 5y ago
  > there's no excuse for not understanding those norms and why they exist, short of some kind of cognitive differences. Yes, and, those exact kinds of cognitive differences are exactly the kind that this profession is known for.
  - dvtrn 5y ago
    and sometimes happen to be the same cognitive differences that get incorrectly hand-waved as "just being shy" by individuals who don't live with said differences.
eimrine 5y ago
"“Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. " best quote from the text.
ramesh31 5y ago
> 1. Write good code. > 2. Be easy to work with. Took me a long time to realize #2 is more important than #1. I'll take a mediocre teachable person with a good attitude over a "10x" jerk on my team any day.
- hef19898 5y ago
  There was talk from, I think, Sensik (?) (anyway, the LinkedIn leadership influencer) about teams. It pointed at that, that being "easy" to work with is more important then being good at your job. He backed that up with something or other about the Navy SEALs (because which other outfit would you use, right?). Thing is, if we stay in the picture, I think the person the SEALs find "easy" to work with might be pretty different from the person Army kitchen staff find "easy", or any non-special-ops unit at that. My point is, the one person's jerk is the other person's "easy to work with" great fit.
vsareto 5y ago
>Any questions? Yeah, so in the example, what does that engineer get for going above-and-beyond and being more effective than most of your team? Because I see that she's doing a lot of critical work, but not a lot about what she gets for putting in that effort. That doesn't feel very motivating.
- frogpelt 5y ago
  Let's flip your question: what's the reward for being hard to work with?
  - throwawaysleep 5y ago
    Don't be hard to work with, but don't spend any extra effort on being effective either. I take the sycophant model of being easy to work with, but I also make sure I don't learn anything outside my silo so that I don't get a lot of work and can interview prep.
  - jmoreno94 5y ago
    There is a middle ground between going above and beyond and being difficult to work with. I tend to have no problem saying no to things that I think are bullshit, I have no problem skipping out on extra "team building" efforts or declining to attend the happy hour. I let my work speak for itself and I figure companies keep me around for that, and coworkers know they can come to me with any issues they might be having. But I have never purposefully taken a coworker out to lunch or asked about their life outside of work (except for when we're on a call before anyone else and they start the conversation), and yet I've had just as much success as people who I've watched do that. That's not to say that I don't get to know my coworkers I just let it happen organically as we're building things and solving problems together rather than going out of my way to make it happen.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  A chance to hone her soft-skills while becoming a more productive engineer. It does a lot more good for her career prospects than doing the bare minimum and relegating her scope to code monkey.
kerblang 5y ago
> One of the most effective engineers I worked with spent her first month here very intentionally taking every single one of her new co-workers out to coffee I worked with someone who did this (lunch instead of coffee) and was singularly despised by everyone because he was also a deranged, compulsive liar. Not that plying me with food & drink is bad; it's just pointless. Somewhat worse is team-building Mandatory Fun Day foolishness. It definitely helps to actually talk regularly and communicate about the work that you're doing, in a rational, sensible way. But too many people think, "Oh if I force them to make friends, they'll somehow start agreeing about everything because they're friends!"
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  The problem wasn’t the lunches. The problem was the person. And that from someone who doesn’t like such lunches.
throwawaysleep 5y ago
Was she rewarded for any of that additional effectiveness? Given how workplaces seem to be structured and how little time you will spend in q job, I don't see a reason to be anything but technologically effective (and only so far as I am learning something), as it will be my interviewing skills that get me to the next level at another company.
bluedino 5y ago
> One of the most effective engineers I worked with spent her first month here very intentionally taking every single one of her new co-workers out to coffee I've heard of companies assigning people to walks. The idea is you go for a 20 minute walk with a random person (until you've gone with everyone), and you're supposed to talk about your job and how its going etc etc. You're also getting a break from the office, some fresh air, and some physical activity.
- compiler-guy 5y ago
  This would drive me crazy. I get along fine with practically everyone, and do pretty well to be easy to work with, but random twenty minute walks with random coworkers would make me feel trapped and awkward. I’m a terrible conversationalist and if I get paired with someone similar it would be twenty minutes of torture.
  - Benjammer 5y ago
    If you have a condition like Asperger's or Autism then I apologize, I don't mean to be insensitive. But, if you have run-of-the-mill social anxiety and/or shyness, then I think time-boxed, scheduled, regular conversations with your co-workers can be just about the best format for practicing your conversation skills that I could think of. I think if you tried to put effort in, you might be able to make more progress than you think you can. Think of it like any other skill you need to practice and develop for work. This isn't a purely social situation, you don't need to be best friends with these people. It's just about practicing your ability to pretend to be a socially confident person in business settings when called for. And to learn about your co-workers personalities so that you can be a more effective and empathetic teammate.
    - compiler-guy 5y ago
      Sure, it's possible that if I put in the effort and practiced I could get better at conversation, and this might be a good venue for doing it. But if I put in the effort, I could also be a much better artist. Or a much better cook, and there are plenty of venues that would be good for it. I get along fine with my coworkers. In all the horrible peer-judging that goes on in Google performance reviews, "Hard to work with" almost never comes up for me. Nor does, "doesn't know what is going on". Nor does, "I wish they would be more socially confident." I get along just fine. But enforced social time with people who I'm not doing projects with? No thanks. I'll do my job, communicate about my job in the standups and whatever normal checkins we have. Fortunately, my skills are in high enough demand that if a role puts more social demands on me, I can just bail for another team or company. It's nice that way.
0x4d464d48 5y ago
Been a software engineer for about 5 years now. One of the best roles I ever had for my professional development was as a sales engineer. Working in a different role at a MAMAA now with less customer interaction. Yet, learning soft skills like understanding who stakeholders are and their pain points increased my efficacy by orders of magnitude. I didn't go into this line of work with the intent of capitalizing on my people skills but there's only so far technical competence can take you. Solving problems is the easy and fun part of the job. Focusing your energy on solving _useful_ problems while developing the listening skills and humility to understand what other people view as problems and managing stakeholder expectations is the hard part.
galoisscobi 5y ago
> Be easy to work with. I’ve been in the industry for less than 5 years, but I might be struggling with this one. I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. Every task I sign up for, they want timelines and status updates every week. Sometimes multiple times every week. If I only had to send out 1 status, once a week, I think I would be way more productive. When I work with other managers/teams, often scope blows up. Hey, can you fix this little thing becomes, you’ve got to build this tool that covers 24 different use cases and give us ETAs for when every single use case will be completed. My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead. Sometimes I get what I call vanity projects. Projects that upper management is leading that don’t make sense (at least I’m not convinced they make sense but could be persuaded otherwise) but are there to win these people brownie points. Sometimes there’s almost an irrational push to work on these things. I feel like I need to do a lot to protect my time so I can do deep work (or what’s left of it) and get the really high priority stuff done. It’s kind of exhausting, I might not be easy to work with and I wish I had more mentorship (I’ve tried to find it at work and haven’t found anything substantial).
- yobbo 5y ago
  Maybe it should be: If the work creates value: be easy to work with. If the proposed work destroys value: be difficult to work with.
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  I had a job where this happened to me and I just let whatever I was currently working on be derailed and worked on that instead. If someone followed up and asked about something else, I would say "X told me to do this." They eventually sorted it out without involving me as they then blamed the other person for the delay.
- foobarian 5y ago
  The way I figure it is, being easy to work with does not mean you do everything asked of you. They are not necessarily the same thing. With the external work requests, it just means you are cordial. When scope blows up then you follow procedure, e.g. you tell them "OK I can't wait to start working on this. It's a larger project though so I'll ask my manager to prioritize it. Let's have a kickoff meeting later this week to plan things out in further detail." Etc. Bottom line who writes your performance review is who you work for.
internetbird 5y ago
I really like and emphesize withe this paragraph: "Being easy to work with doesn’t mean being a sycophant or a pushover. It doesn’t mean not having and expressing strong opinions. In fact, some of the people I find easiest to work with are people who consistently disagree with me! “Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. You communicate clearly. You value your commitments."
recursivedoubts 5y ago
You have two jobs: * Write code * Do not express any opinions that conflict with the dominant zeitgeist edit: I'm not joking. In most tech firms these are your two jobs.
- 0x4d464d48 5y ago
  I prefer to think of it as "express your contradictory opinion only if you're absolutely sure this is the hill you want to die on." ... Most of the time it's not such a hill.
- ineedasername 5y ago
  I'd write that as: "Don't venture off the path of work-related topics, especially on any divisive subject". When people complain about it being awkward to express a specific set of opinions at work, to me it comes across as complaining that wasting time on non-work conversations is frowned upon. It's even stranger to me that someone would want to disregard their job duties in favor of discussions on topics that might make half the people you work with angry.
- nunorbatista 5y ago
  You need to pick your fights. Some projects are just made to be "done" for reasons that are bigger than you. Sometimes you just have to get over with it, even if you have a contrarian position. If you want to express opinions that conflict with the dominant zeitgeist, it's important to understand the context and position you're in. This is not black and white.
csours 5y ago
Interesting to think of this in the context of Glue Work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw Building culture means handling these opposing forces in a productive manner.
rtikulit 5y ago
My formula for success is similar. 1. Be good at your job (aka write good code). 2. Be easy to work with. 3. Be a member of the prevailing tribe. 4. Be charismatic. With all four, you're a superstar. Any three, great career. Any two, average career. Just one, unstable employment. Only one is directly functional, three can be trained to some degree, and one can be faked adequately if absolutely necessary, but it can be mentally unhealthy. If you don't understand why you aren't getting ahead, apply this model and train a weak category. I came up with this 30 years ago when a young man with limited skills and experience asked me “how do I succeed?” and I was looking for universal factors. It also shows how to have a great career while being bad at the job. Oh, and it doesn't cover sociopathic strategies. :-)
- ChuckNorris89 5y ago
  Your formula of success has many truths in it but missed a few big and important ones: 5. Be in a hot area with many opportunities you can leverage. Being a rockstar is not enough if there aren't many employers bidding for your expertise. 6. Market yourself and have visibility to your professional successes both inside your org and, ideally, outside as well, for others to spot your talent and approach you. Being a rockstar is insufficient if the results of your work are not visible up the org chart, to the guys who sign the pay cheques or to outside competitors. 7. Have a network of contacts you can leverage. In my area, best jobs are gotten through connections. The open positions you find on LinkedIn are the bottom of the barrel left after the good spots got taken. 8. Have up to date technical skills that match the demand of the market in your area. Being a rockstar is not gonna get you anywhere if you were a rockstar in an obsolete tech nobody needs anymore or has been offshored.
  - rtikulit 5y ago
    Those are great points. I have to think about how to incorporate them. I'm thinking that the four are still required to fully exploit the ones you've mentioned.
    - ChuckNorris89 5y ago
motohagiography 5y ago
Yes, be easy to work with, but once you get into institutions, that means something entirely different. One of the reasons I can be difficult to work with is that I have technical skills that make many concrete truths obvious very quickly, and truth is the ultimate forcing function. It's also the source of my value, since I trade on those skills. However, much of business is about timing, positioning, alignment, association, exposure to opportunity, narrative attention, and literally just talking, stalling, and bullshitting until another variable in the equation resolves or falls into place and makes the decision for all involved without having to spend precious political capital on buy in. Sometimes the technical truth is that free variable. When it isn't, as someone who trades on being the guy with insights, options, answers, and integrity, saying I don't know when I really, really do to sustain some necessary uncertainty for others is sometimes a bigger lift than I'm prepared to make. That's a natural cost of having tech skills, but it's also a ceiling on how much value you can provide if you can't sustain dissonance long enough to support your team as they get positioned around those business variables above. If you get fired, it's probably over this. The point is to say, a durable skill like room reading, extended to organization and narrative reading takes a lot of intentional practice, and a lot of the non-technical people we work with have only ever done this, and have thousands of man hours practice ahead of you. Being easy to work with isn't about being nice, or agreeable, or even "political," it's recognizing the abstractions that hold the team and org together and providing reinforcement and continuity for it. That's the job. Revenue, growth, savings, optimizations etc are the downstream effect. I don't think anyone really articulates this stuff because you can't both play the game well while providing commentary for it at the same time, so a lot of career advice is the elaborate charade of pointing to these things without saying them and giving the game away. YMMV, but this is to say, consider whether being right is being smart, and make sure you always practice indexing on the latter and opportunity just appears.
- sideshowb 5y ago
  Interesting take. Can you expand on "the abstractions that hold the team together"?
  - motohagiography 5y ago
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]

59 points by ColinWright 5y ago

If you're new to the 'professional' working world, then I can understand a lack of conformance with the norms of those environments. However, if you've been working in professional environments for a while, there's no excuse for not understanding those norms and why they exist, short of some kind of cognitive differences.

jpitz 5y ago
> there's no excuse for not understanding those norms and why they exist, short of some kind of cognitive differences. Yes, and, those exact kinds of cognitive differences are exactly the kind that this profession is known for.
- dvtrn 5y ago
  and sometimes happen to be the same cognitive differences that get incorrectly hand-waved as "just being shy" by individuals who don't live with said differences.

eimrine 5y ago

"“Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. " best quote from the text.

ramesh31 5y ago

> 1. Write good code. > 2. Be easy to work with. Took me a long time to realize #2 is more important than #1. I'll take a mediocre teachable person with a good attitude over a "10x" jerk on my team any day.

hef19898 5y ago
There was talk from, I think, Sensik (?) (anyway, the LinkedIn leadership influencer) about teams. It pointed at that, that being "easy" to work with is more important then being good at your job. He backed that up with something or other about the Navy SEALs (because which other outfit would you use, right?). Thing is, if we stay in the picture, I think the person the SEALs find "easy" to work with might be pretty different from the person Army kitchen staff find "easy", or any non-special-ops unit at that. My point is, the one person's jerk is the other person's "easy to work with" great fit.

vsareto 5y ago

>Any questions? Yeah, so in the example, what does that engineer get for going above-and-beyond and being more effective than most of your team? Because I see that she's doing a lot of critical work, but not a lot about what she gets for putting in that effort. That doesn't feel very motivating.

frogpelt 5y ago
Let's flip your question: what's the reward for being hard to work with?
- throwawaysleep 5y ago
  Don't be hard to work with, but don't spend any extra effort on being effective either. I take the sycophant model of being easy to work with, but I also make sure I don't learn anything outside my silo so that I don't get a lot of work and can interview prep.
- jmoreno94 5y ago
  There is a middle ground between going above and beyond and being difficult to work with. I tend to have no problem saying no to things that I think are bullshit, I have no problem skipping out on extra "team building" efforts or declining to attend the happy hour. I let my work speak for itself and I figure companies keep me around for that, and coworkers know they can come to me with any issues they might be having. But I have never purposefully taken a coworker out to lunch or asked about their life outside of work (except for when we're on a call before anyone else and they start the conversation), and yet I've had just as much success as people who I've watched do that. That's not to say that I don't get to know my coworkers I just let it happen organically as we're building things and solving problems together rather than going out of my way to make it happen.
0x4d464d48 5y ago
A chance to hone her soft-skills while becoming a more productive engineer. It does a lot more good for her career prospects than doing the bare minimum and relegating her scope to code monkey.

kerblang 5y ago

> One of the most effective engineers I worked with spent her first month here very intentionally taking every single one of her new co-workers out to coffee I worked with someone who did this (lunch instead of coffee) and was singularly despised by everyone because he was also a deranged, compulsive liar. Not that plying me with food & drink is bad; it's just pointless. Somewhat worse is team-building Mandatory Fun Day foolishness. It definitely helps to actually talk regularly and communicate about the work that you're doing, in a rational, sensible way. But too many people think, "Oh if I force them to make friends, they'll somehow start agreeing about everything because they're friends!"

compiler-guy 5y ago
The problem wasn’t the lunches. The problem was the person. And that from someone who doesn’t like such lunches.

throwawaysleep 5y ago

Was she rewarded for any of that additional effectiveness? Given how workplaces seem to be structured and how little time you will spend in q job, I don't see a reason to be anything but technologically effective (and only so far as I am learning something), as it will be my interviewing skills that get me to the next level at another company.

bluedino 5y ago

> One of the most effective engineers I worked with spent her first month here very intentionally taking every single one of her new co-workers out to coffee I've heard of companies assigning people to walks. The idea is you go for a 20 minute walk with a random person (until you've gone with everyone), and you're supposed to talk about your job and how its going etc etc. You're also getting a break from the office, some fresh air, and some physical activity.

compiler-guy 5y ago
This would drive me crazy. I get along fine with practically everyone, and do pretty well to be easy to work with, but random twenty minute walks with random coworkers would make me feel trapped and awkward. I’m a terrible conversationalist and if I get paired with someone similar it would be twenty minutes of torture.
- Benjammer 5y ago
  If you have a condition like Asperger's or Autism then I apologize, I don't mean to be insensitive. But, if you have run-of-the-mill social anxiety and/or shyness, then I think time-boxed, scheduled, regular conversations with your co-workers can be just about the best format for practicing your conversation skills that I could think of. I think if you tried to put effort in, you might be able to make more progress than you think you can. Think of it like any other skill you need to practice and develop for work. This isn't a purely social situation, you don't need to be best friends with these people. It's just about practicing your ability to pretend to be a socially confident person in business settings when called for. And to learn about your co-workers personalities so that you can be a more effective and empathetic teammate.
  - compiler-guy 5y ago
    Sure, it's possible that if I put in the effort and practiced I could get better at conversation, and this might be a good venue for doing it. But if I put in the effort, I could also be a much better artist. Or a much better cook, and there are plenty of venues that would be good for it. I get along fine with my coworkers. In all the horrible peer-judging that goes on in Google performance reviews, "Hard to work with" almost never comes up for me. Nor does, "doesn't know what is going on". Nor does, "I wish they would be more socially confident." I get along just fine. But enforced social time with people who I'm not doing projects with? No thanks. I'll do my job, communicate about my job in the standups and whatever normal checkins we have. Fortunately, my skills are in high enough demand that if a role puts more social demands on me, I can just bail for another team or company. It's nice that way.

0x4d464d48 5y ago

Been a software engineer for about 5 years now. One of the best roles I ever had for my professional development was as a sales engineer. Working in a different role at a MAMAA now with less customer interaction. Yet, learning soft skills like understanding who stakeholders are and their pain points increased my efficacy by orders of magnitude. I didn't go into this line of work with the intent of capitalizing on my people skills but there's only so far technical competence can take you. Solving problems is the easy and fun part of the job. Focusing your energy on solving _useful_ problems while developing the listening skills and humility to understand what other people view as problems and managing stakeholder expectations is the hard part.

galoisscobi 5y ago

> Be easy to work with. I’ve been in the industry for less than 5 years, but I might be struggling with this one. I’m an IC and get so many direct requests from my manager, other managers, my team members and people from other teams. Every task I sign up for, they want timelines and status updates every week. Sometimes multiple times every week. If I only had to send out 1 status, once a week, I think I would be way more productive. When I work with other managers/teams, often scope blows up. Hey, can you fix this little thing becomes, you’ve got to build this tool that covers 24 different use cases and give us ETAs for when every single use case will be completed. My defense strategy has become to keep adding friction to the request process (keep asking for more specifications before I can start work) if the requests aren’t coming from my team/manager. Sometimes people go away, sometimes they pivot to other projects and ask if I can do that instead. Sometimes I get what I call vanity projects. Projects that upper management is leading that don’t make sense (at least I’m not convinced they make sense but could be persuaded otherwise) but are there to win these people brownie points. Sometimes there’s almost an irrational push to work on these things. I feel like I need to do a lot to protect my time so I can do deep work (or what’s left of it) and get the really high priority stuff done. It’s kind of exhausting, I might not be easy to work with and I wish I had more mentorship (I’ve tried to find it at work and haven’t found anything substantial).

yobbo 5y ago
Maybe it should be: If the work creates value: be easy to work with. If the proposed work destroys value: be difficult to work with.
throwawaysleep 5y ago
I had a job where this happened to me and I just let whatever I was currently working on be derailed and worked on that instead. If someone followed up and asked about something else, I would say "X told me to do this." They eventually sorted it out without involving me as they then blamed the other person for the delay.
foobarian 5y ago
The way I figure it is, being easy to work with does not mean you do everything asked of you. They are not necessarily the same thing. With the external work requests, it just means you are cordial. When scope blows up then you follow procedure, e.g. you tell them "OK I can't wait to start working on this. It's a larger project though so I'll ask my manager to prioritize it. Let's have a kickoff meeting later this week to plan things out in further detail." Etc. Bottom line who writes your performance review is who you work for.

internetbird 5y ago

I really like and emphesize withe this paragraph: "Being easy to work with doesn’t mean being a sycophant or a pushover. It doesn’t mean not having and expressing strong opinions. In fact, some of the people I find easiest to work with are people who consistently disagree with me! “Easy to work with” means that you act professionally at all times. You disagree respectfully. You seek to understand before looking to be understood. You communicate clearly. You value your commitments."

recursivedoubts 5y ago

You have two jobs: * Write code * Do not express any opinions that conflict with the dominant zeitgeist edit: I'm not joking. In most tech firms these are your two jobs.

0x4d464d48 5y ago
I prefer to think of it as "express your contradictory opinion only if you're absolutely sure this is the hill you want to die on." ... Most of the time it's not such a hill.
ineedasername 5y ago
I'd write that as: "Don't venture off the path of work-related topics, especially on any divisive subject". When people complain about it being awkward to express a specific set of opinions at work, to me it comes across as complaining that wasting time on non-work conversations is frowned upon. It's even stranger to me that someone would want to disregard their job duties in favor of discussions on topics that might make half the people you work with angry.
nunorbatista 5y ago
You need to pick your fights. Some projects are just made to be "done" for reasons that are bigger than you. Sometimes you just have to get over with it, even if you have a contrarian position. If you want to express opinions that conflict with the dominant zeitgeist, it's important to understand the context and position you're in. This is not black and white.

csours 5y ago

Interesting to think of this in the context of Glue Work. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KClAPipnKqw Building culture means handling these opposing forces in a productive manner.

rtikulit 5y ago

My formula for success is similar. 1. Be good at your job (aka write good code). 2. Be easy to work with. 3. Be a member of the prevailing tribe. 4. Be charismatic. With all four, you're a superstar. Any three, great career. Any two, average career. Just one, unstable employment. Only one is directly functional, three can be trained to some degree, and one can be faked adequately if absolutely necessary, but it can be mentally unhealthy. If you don't understand why you aren't getting ahead, apply this model and train a weak category. I came up with this 30 years ago when a young man with limited skills and experience asked me “how do I succeed?” and I was looking for universal factors. It also shows how to have a great career while being bad at the job. Oh, and it doesn't cover sociopathic strategies. :-)

ChuckNorris89 5y ago
Your formula of success has many truths in it but missed a few big and important ones: 5. Be in a hot area with many opportunities you can leverage. Being a rockstar is not enough if there aren't many employers bidding for your expertise. 6. Market yourself and have visibility to your professional successes both inside your org and, ideally, outside as well, for others to spot your talent and approach you. Being a rockstar is insufficient if the results of your work are not visible up the org chart, to the guys who sign the pay cheques or to outside competitors. 7. Have a network of contacts you can leverage. In my area, best jobs are gotten through connections. The open positions you find on LinkedIn are the bottom of the barrel left after the good spots got taken. 8. Have up to date technical skills that match the demand of the market in your area. Being a rockstar is not gonna get you anywhere if you were a rockstar in an obsolete tech nobody needs anymore or has been offshored.
- rtikulit 5y ago
  Those are great points. I have to think about how to incorporate them. I'm thinking that the four are still required to fully exploit the ones you've mentioned.
  - ChuckNorris89 5y ago

motohagiography 5y ago

Yes, be easy to work with, but once you get into institutions, that means something entirely different. One of the reasons I can be difficult to work with is that I have technical skills that make many concrete truths obvious very quickly, and truth is the ultimate forcing function. It's also the source of my value, since I trade on those skills. However, much of business is about timing, positioning, alignment, association, exposure to opportunity, narrative attention, and literally just talking, stalling, and bullshitting until another variable in the equation resolves or falls into place and makes the decision for all involved without having to spend precious political capital on buy in. Sometimes the technical truth is that free variable. When it isn't, as someone who trades on being the guy with insights, options, answers, and integrity, saying I don't know when I really, really do to sustain some necessary uncertainty for others is sometimes a bigger lift than I'm prepared to make. That's a natural cost of having tech skills, but it's also a ceiling on how much value you can provide if you can't sustain dissonance long enough to support your team as they get positioned around those business variables above. If you get fired, it's probably over this. The point is to say, a durable skill like room reading, extended to organization and narrative reading takes a lot of intentional practice, and a lot of the non-technical people we work with have only ever done this, and have thousands of man hours practice ahead of you. Being easy to work with isn't about being nice, or agreeable, or even "political," it's recognizing the abstractions that hold the team and org together and providing reinforcement and continuity for it. That's the job. Revenue, growth, savings, optimizations etc are the downstream effect. I don't think anyone really articulates this stuff because you can't both play the game well while providing commentary for it at the same time, so a lot of career advice is the elaborate charade of pointing to these things without saying them and giving the game away. YMMV, but this is to say, consider whether being right is being smart, and make sure you always practice indexing on the latter and opportunity just appears.

sideshowb 5y ago
Interesting take. Can you expand on "the abstractions that hold the team together"?
- motohagiography 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]