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The truth is that what you actually do at work doesn’t really matter. The important thing is how your work is perceived and that is a function of how well you a
by jmyeet 4y ago
The truth is that what you actually do at work doesn’t really matter. The important thing is how your work is perceived and that is a function of how well you are liked which itself correlated with common background, cultural similarity and essentially innate quality of trustworthiness (there’s research on this).
Let me give you an example of how this can play out. Say you do the dirty work no one wants to do. These are are all possible outcomes:
- you get stuck with that and it becomes expected of you
- people feel that area still sucks so you didn’t have a lot of impact
- people really value your impact
- you’re viewed as having initiative and tackling hard problems
- you’re viewed as not tracking org priorities and instead doing work nobody cares about
- you get more opportunity to work in high profile projects because of your efforts
- you get less opportunities because you’re too essential in your dirty work
- you get less opportunities because you’re viewed as not working in what’s high impact
- you will get no credit for avoiding a catastrophic failure that didn’t happen. Worse, people may wonder what you’ve been doing (y2k anyone?)
All of these narratives can be constructed from the same set of facts. Part of this relies on your ability to communicate. A bigger part is networking. But the biggest factor of all is whether or not they like you.
EDIT: fixes as per comments below. Thanks!
- Noumenon72 4y agoBased on your last sentence, I think your first paragraph's "is not a function of how well you are liked" should not have the "not".
- Noumenon72 4y agoAlso, I think "not tracking org properties" should be "not tracking org priorities".
- cgh 4y ago> - you will get no credit for avoiding a catastrophic failure that didn’t happen. Worse, people may wonder what you’ve been doing (y2k anyone?) This is so true it hurts. I worked for years at a certain Silicon Valley BigCorp on a low-level networking library with one other guy. We of course had bugs but we managed them and delivered on time. It was therefore assumed that our library was "easy" (it wasn't) and the buggy deliverables that made up other parts of the application were "hard" (they often weren't). So the folks who eventually delivered the buggy libraries got the recognition while we toiled more or less in obscurity. It was a bitter lesson in the importance of self-promotion.
- qwertygerty 4y agoI feel you. In one of my jobs, despite the output being different, I eventually realised that management perceived the guys who bitch the most, as the most hard working. In reality, their bitching was a fascade to allow them slack. Quietly working through tough situations made it seem like all was well, even easy. The loud guys got all the attention, and praise; "wow, after all of that pain, you perservered, here is a nice bonus for you" :facepalm