4 ms·
You misunderstand: work is not about a collection of individual contributions by skilled professionals, it's about convincing someone to give you time and money
by xwolfi 3y ago
You misunderstand: work is not about a collection of individual contributions by skilled professionals, it's about convincing someone to give you time and money in exchange for providing the minimum satisfactory output. The client doesn't care how well or hard you work: he wants it asap for as little money as possible, and everything else in the chain between the client and you reacts to this tension.
If a manager never sees you, and you produce a difficult to sell output, then he's not gonna suffer reputational damage for your sake defending you and your reasons for being X or Y on the output. If you produce an obvious advantage, then yes, but it's not everyone, and not every year: you will need, at some point, for someone else to do something for you.
If not, no big deal anyway: you can just be fired and move on. But it's never gonna be about firm handshakes, it's about trust even in temporary failure.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Agingcoder 3y agoI very much agree with this, but it took me a long time to get it. I believe it’s one of the key difficulties for more technical types : understanding that software engineering, once you go past the very local aspects of it ( my dev on my workstation in programming language A ) is first and foremost and human activity. Some may want to ignore this, but like you said at some point it becomes quite expensive to ignore, so you’d rather have something quite valuable to sell to compensate for it.
- oldandboring 3y agoI may have found the only two sane people on HN. Of course, my handle is 'oldandboring' and yours is 'Agingcoder' so perhaps our grey hairs have something to do with this. I find it's not just technical people but everyone, everywhere seems to have irrational understandings of the nature of business and of the employer-employee relationship.
- yieldcrv 3y agothe relationship just isn’t relevant I think there is merit to everything you say, if you’re flying blind and wondering why anything happens to you but if you objectively don’t care and work with integrity towards company output, none of the reindeer games matter yes, in a tighter job market where you have no savings all those things in your current job and those prior relationships matter if you want to reject that at the risk of being poorer, people are saying that’s fine too. if thats the reason you’re not financially stable: understandable, good for you for keeping a work life balance or prioritizing your mental health people aren't trying to say you’re inaccurate, only wrong in the sense that it’s not a necessary way to live and they aren’t going to pretend that it is anymore
- oldandboring 3y agoNow I am confused.