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I guess I'll be honest with myself and say I'm probably the equivalent of the B lane swimmer in a certain area. Some might say I'm A but maybe there's always an

I guess I'll be honest with myself and say I'm probably the equivalent of the B lane swimmer in a certain area. Some might say I'm A but maybe there's always an A lane where you're B? I guess it depends on your goals; most of life isn't reduced to a single clear metric like speed. One of the things I find frustrating in this particular area — and maybe not all areas are like this — is how much things like luck and questionable ethics separates A from B. I don't mean to suggest all of it is like that, or that A people are all unethical people who stumbled on their fortune by chance, but a lot of the differences between A and B that I see are due to things like B people being especially unlucky at where they landed their first job, or A people being especially lucky, or A people in fact being pretty ethically sketchy or outright corrupt about certain things. So I tend to get especially angry when I see these relatively big consequences from differences that don't really matter, or the differences aren't actually present, or people in the area professionally pretend all this stuff isn't going even though everyone wholly acknowledges in private it is. So the more I think about it, the more I'm not really sure the swimming analogy is entirely apt. There you have a pretty clear criterion, and it's all about what lane you're in. In life, the criteria might differ from person to person, the lanes come with major consequences, and there's plenty of chances to game the criteria where they do exist. It's like if which lane you were in was determined by a lifeguard with a timer, but the swimming time differences between lanes were smaller than the error tolerance of the timing devices, and a majority of swimmers (but not all) were bribing the lifeguards for lanes. The way in which the comparison is apt is that as you get "up" the lanes, the more and more stressful it gets, until you cash out or get a secure position or whatever, when it becomes worth it, whatever "it" is. So you're sensitive to BS until it doesn't matter because you've already got yours. As you go down, you're surrounded by people who don't really give a damn about trying to go up, it's just not a concern of theirs. So superficially the pattern of stress is probably similar. But in general, I'm not sure it's really the same processes causing that stress.

darkerside 3y ago
Everyone does ethical and unethical things. We all try to do more ethical things and fewer, or no, unethical things. But IME nobody is perfect. When you're in second place, it becomes really easy to see all the unethical things the A swimmer is doing, and to forget about any of the less than ethical things you might have done to succeed. And if someone is really doing something qualitatively unethical, it will often catch up with them. Be patient.
taneq 3y ago
In my experience, something that really separates “A players” (in the career sense, rather than technical skills) from “B players” is focus on the metagame. Networking, schmoozing, manoeuvring, strategically chasing easier high-profile projects and side stepping poisoned chalices. Often this behaviour results in more rapid advancement at the expense of the people they they clamber over on their way up the ladder.
MichaelZuo 3y ago
That doesn't really contradict the post. The equivalent in the swimming world would be the A lane swimmers who are secretly doping, and would have close to no chance of making it otherwise, at best a B or C lane swimmer without. They can still be superficially very friendly and cheerful people, almost exactly like the genuine, bonafide, A lane swimmers. Of course if you closely examined their every thought and action for hours on end you might end up with a different conclusion, but how many of those types of situations will the average HN reader ever encounter in their lives? For the vast majority of folks the vast majority of the time, nearly all genuine and false 'A's are indistinguishable.

darkerside 3y ago

Everyone does ethical and unethical things. We all try to do more ethical things and fewer, or no, unethical things. But IME nobody is perfect. When you're in second place, it becomes really easy to see all the unethical things the A swimmer is doing, and to forget about any of the less than ethical things you might have done to succeed. And if someone is really doing something qualitatively unethical, it will often catch up with them. Be patient.

taneq 3y ago

In my experience, something that really separates “A players” (in the career sense, rather than technical skills) from “B players” is focus on the metagame. Networking, schmoozing, manoeuvring, strategically chasing easier high-profile projects and side stepping poisoned chalices. Often this behaviour results in more rapid advancement at the expense of the people they they clamber over on their way up the ladder.

MichaelZuo 3y ago

That doesn't really contradict the post. The equivalent in the swimming world would be the A lane swimmers who are secretly doping, and would have close to no chance of making it otherwise, at best a B or C lane swimmer without. They can still be superficially very friendly and cheerful people, almost exactly like the genuine, bonafide, A lane swimmers. Of course if you closely examined their every thought and action for hours on end you might end up with a different conclusion, but how many of those types of situations will the average HN reader ever encounter in their lives? For the vast majority of folks the vast majority of the time, nearly all genuine and false 'A's are indistinguishable.