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I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, m

I've been contemplating the issue in the headline, as pertains to my value. When I help somebody in 40 mins with something they've been stuck on for 3 months, my value is clear to everyone. When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Don't know how to deal with this paradox.

jvanderbot 3y ago
Unfortunately one of the best ways is to toot your own horn. If you work with good folks, it will be appreciated for you to present a tricky problem you solved, or to present a design you put forth that would save everyone time.
runamuck 3y ago
Easy - half a$$ your code and when it breaks - swoop in, "fix things" (actually do it right) and play the role of hero! (I've seen so-called "Rock Stars" at places I worked do this over and over)
- samstave 3y ago
  For i in employment ensure there is someone who checks in with me every month when they read this line of code, else, stop code from running so they come to me.
- syndicatedjelly 3y ago
  Would you feel good about being that kind of engineer, if the external validation was great enough?
  - circusfly 3y ago
    It's OK, the new validation method is AI driven, we're good.
  - sodapopcan 3y ago
    When the external validation is monetary then you gotta do what you gotta do.
  - tmtvl 3y ago
    There are people with integrity and principles; and then there are people who can pay their rent every month.
    - Aeolun 3y ago
      I was kinda happy when my company replaced their previous feel good nonsense ‘principles’ with ‘do the right thing, even when nobody is looking’. Of course it doesn’t change anything about the people that work there, but the people at the top now clearly have a better idea of how it works than the last ones :P
  - Asooka 3y ago
    We review each other's code before it goes in. If the team says they're happy to work with it, then I've fulfilled my obligation. I am literally not paid to write the best code in the world. In fact, the company gives bonuses for fixing things, so they are in fact paying me to sneak bugs in. What you do though is, you leave a very obscure edge case unhandled, make note of it, then just don't tell anyone. Invariably someone will hit it exactly one day before you're scheduled to go live. Then just apply the fix (make sure to procrastinate long enough to simulate working on it) and voila! The longest I've seen an edge case go unfixed in this manner has been three years. Though truth be told I'm not smart enough to add bugs on purpose, I just sometimes notice I've failed to address an edge case and ... leave it. If it turns out to be important - I can fix it when the fix's value is maximum. Half my day is spent fixing others' unhandled edge cases, so it's nice to have one tucked away for a rainy day that you know you can fix easily.
    - jddj 3y ago
      How bizarre. I guess I can count myself lucky that I don't seem to live in that particular world. Is the problem the incentive itself, eg. if they didn't reward fixed bugs would you write better (even just better communicated) code?
    - BobbyTables2 3y ago
      I can see how many would object to what you’re suggesting. However, I’ve also had managers who pushed back against nice-to-have cleanups as the product matured (especially close to a release). They had cause as the product became overly complex, where issues were tedious to root cause and fix. I tended to queue up a lot of improvements and then unleash them at the beginning of a release cycle. Later QA would find a problem in the previous release but couldn’t reproduce in the later one… because I had already fixed it. I didn’t introduce bugs intentionally, and the fixes were visible as we had to backport them for point releases, etc.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    You mean money? Abso-fucking-lately I would do it. Moral points don’t pay my mortgage.
- SilasX 3y ago
  Hah, that was in my archetypal description of the fake 10xer, that somehow they are able to swoop in and fix their spaghetti code, come what may, while no one else can make sense of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325
- Jtsummers 3y ago
  Don't do it right, double down on the flaws. You had a 3k SLOC single function (all in main) C program to do something that could be expressed cleanly and clearly in 200 SLOC. Some specific sequence of inputs leads to an error. Instead of tidying it up, removing the repetition that led to the mistake, you copy/paste everything again and add another 100 cases to your various switch/case statements (actually you use if/else because switch/case might make things clearer). The specific problem is solved, but in a year another buggy code path will be discovered and you'll have another chance to play hero. In 5 years it'll be 50k SLOC of C all in main, that could have been under 1k SLOC (still all in main). No one else will be able to fix it but you!
  - actionfromafar 3y ago
    For extra points, keep the sane solution in a secret source file, then implement a compiler which generates the obfuscated spaghetti. :-P
    - agumonkey 3y ago
      and enjoy your participation to the ioccc :)
    - Jtsummers 3y ago
      I kind of did that once. For a proprietary language that didn't support functions and had very limited support for loops (mostly labels and gotos, it is sold for way too much per seat for a niche industry and the language and implementation are awful). I needed to implement something that was too tedious to write out by hand (~1500 lines of this nonsense) so I made a Python program that spit out the code I needed. The company that makes it also has a generator they use when they're contracted to make more code in their awful language. It's bad, the code has to be manually cleaned up and sometimes is delivered broken. Then they get the money on the support contract to fix their problems. (It's not their only product/service, but it's key to many of their services, a way of hooking customers.) Their generator did not using the looping constructs, and several of their "senior" engineers actively discouraged it because "You can't be sure a loop will do what you want it to do." (Wish that weren't an actual quote.)
- farhanhubble 3y ago
  This is exactly what happens at many software companies. People,sometimes under pressure to meet deadlines, apply totally crazy fixes to stop one problem and create new problems.
  - withinboredom 3y ago
    I’ve seen it both ways. In one case dev spends 3 days refactoring code beautifully to fix the bug; ships to production only to find out that it wasn’t the only bug in this code path. Now they spend another 2 days refactoring before repeating the process and so on. Meanwhile, the company is losing money/customers/favorite vanity metric/whatever. Or. Dev hacks a fix up, sends to prod. Sees another bug and fixes immediately. No loss in revenue/customers/favorite vanity metric/whatever. Dev creates ticket to refactor/fix code properly and adds to next sprint. PM removes from next sprint to get capacity for further resume driven management projects. Issue crops up again due to hack. Original dev is now able to do ticket originally removed from sprint.
    - farhanhubble 3y ago
      Definitely. Like so many other things it's the spirit and intent that matter.
- sharess 3y ago
  Another option is to work at a consultancy where you hop aboard a new customer project every 3-6 months. Approach every customer as an opportunity to do some resume-driven development and pick a bunch of untested new technologies to experiment with. Be sure to do at least a couple of presentations to tell everyone about the hottest new things you are doing to bring value to the customers. Leave the project once it slowly starts sinking and then just keep hopping from customer to customer. You will be far away once the sea water starts coming through the windows and the non-technical people directing these projects will never figure out what you did. I have seen that this is one of the most efficient ways to advance your career especially in larger consultancy companies with hundreds or thousands of different customers.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    For maximum results, trade-off with a buddy: Spend Q1 each crashing your respective project; spend Q2 as a fixer undoing that damage using his knowledge of his own work. You’re both cutting edge and a proven fixer!
    - kitd 3y ago
      Reminds me of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Tuco is a wanted man, Blondie brings him in and gets the reward money. Then just as Tuco is about to hang, Blondie shoots the rope and they both escape to another state ... where Tuco is also a wanted man.
    - acdha 3y ago
      Government contracting is the pathological case for that: if they haven’t been allowed to hire civil servants, they have no choice but to use a handful of big companies. The shortage of in-house expertise makes it hard to know if the work is being planned or performed correctly so a common strategy is to hire one company to oversee the work of another company. Unfortunately, since there are only a few companies in the space and job hopping is the best path for a raise or to avoid layoffs when contracts turn over, it’s rare for anyone to be very critical of past or future coworkers.
- ponector 3y ago
  It is more easy: do your job right, but do not comment, fix or somehow improve work of your colleagues. Let them fail, aknowledge failure and only then come with fix, get all praise. Never point to the possible issues at the code reviews, retirement refinements etc.
  - zmgsabst 3y ago
    This, but seriously: Let your junior colleagues fail on a schedule within the margin of error on your planning, but keep a close enough eye on them so you know how to bail it out if they can’t pull it together with a little extra time/guidance. Okay — still give good code reviews, but if you let them face-plant a little on design, etc, then they get experience. And you don’t look dumb when it turns out they were right. But you do look like a hero when they’re struggling to get across the line, and you whisk in to fix it.
    - necrotic_comp 3y ago
      This is also just good practice in general. You learn through struggle, so giving juniors a safety net (when they don't know they have it), is a good way to get them up the curve.
  - ozim 3y ago
    That is naive take, you really think if you work hard on improving code, pointing out flaws, there will never be any issues? In reality that I live, there is never enough time, if you have 3-4 team mates pumping features out, it is already impossible to prevent every problem and review every piece of code. I don't have to be cynical about it, it just happens that issues will crop up over time and I am there to fix them and there is never enough time to prevent them up-front, because if you will try then you will never deliver anything. Ship fast and break things is maybe too far - but still shipping something beats not shipping ideal state.
    - UK-AL 3y ago
      We have a very good test suite, I don't think there's been a bad release in years.
- godelski 3y ago
  I don't think you're wrong, but god what a waste of time. Can't we just fix the actual problem?
  - hinkley 3y ago
    One middle ground I've found is to write tools or processes for myself or a mentee, with the intention to avoid avoidable problems. And then use the next time someone breaks things as an opportunity to advertise the preventative measure. Frequently I end up having to do one more PR to get the tool to correct the exact problem the team experienced, so in practical terms is much less of a 'witholding' and more of a 'burning in' situation. But the final product does end up getting written in hours instead of days so while I don't get the credit I feel entitled to for foresight, I get mis-attributed with being able to solve difficult problems quickly. Which is kinda true. I hate being caught flat footed so I'm always squirreling away fragments of a Plan C.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    How?
- Scoundreller 3y ago
  don't even need to half a$$ it, just use timebombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_bomb_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_bomb_(software) Usually only works if you're the only dev, unless you get creative with counters like the original devs that made some nice cash fixing it all for y2k (officially: don't do this)
  - kevindamm 3y ago
    2038 is getting closer every year...
  - staunton 3y ago
    The AI will analyze your codebase next year and the company will sue you if you do stuff like that...
- darth_avocado 3y ago
  That's literally how promo packs work in FAANG (minus the N) and other adjacent tech companies.
  - goodpoint 3y ago
    Nope.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  I was just considering it, but never had a chance to see it in real life. I'm dumbfounded about all this, you spend years learning and reading books about the craft but the only topic which will matter is how you can con the game ?.. weird.
- hinkley 3y ago
  Having people thank me for being 'on top of' a problem that I already know about because I'm the one who pushed the button that broke it... It's gross. It feels gross. Much happier when I can fix something quickly because I have some tools or logic in the codebase already that lets me do something quickly by being covered with sanity checks so I can zip along without driving us off a cliff.
  - staunton 3y ago
    There's some people who break something, realize it, just leave it as is, and cannot comprehend why you would think they should maybe help fix it... So I'd guess the praise is for not being like that.
    - hinkley 3y ago
      I see what you're saying, but that still feels like a participation trophy to me.
- cloverich 3y ago
  In high school I actually had a friend teach me this in a humorous way. In football we did sprints (the kind where you physically run) at the end. He said -- half ass the sprints. Then on the last sprint, run as fast as you can, you'll have more energy left, and when they see you running fastest you'll get all the credit. He was doing it as a joke, but lo and behold he out runs everyone on the last sprint by a lot, and the coach specifically pulls him aside as an example of how everyone else should carry themselves. He's one of my favorite pranksters. But needless to say, the football team was not very good.
  - pintxo 3y ago
    Nice example for the (common?) inability of many managers to assess performance realistically.
  - bluGill 3y ago
    In the case of football that might actually be a good lesson: save enough energy for the end of the game so that you can play best when the other team is tired. Of course you need to play the whole game, but if you play all but the last 5 minutes working just hard enough to keep a tie game, then you can pull ahead in the end. This only works in time limited sports though. Most real world situations are not time limited like that and so the advice doesn't apply.
    - braingravy 3y ago
      That really only works if the other team is terrible relative to your own. ‘Playing to tie’ a team that is an even match (or close to an even match) results in a competitive advantage for their side. This does work ok for long distance competitive running, since the factors at play are time and metabolic rate and is missing the strategy present in team based ball sports like football, soccer, basketball, etc.
    - mmsimanga 3y ago
      On sprint training. Me and a friend figured out that if you moved your arms fast whilst not running a full sprint it gave the appearance that you were trying very hard and coach didn't give you a hard time. Like most slackers instead of using the trick once in a while we over did it and the coach soon figured it out. The result was even more sprints. Needless to say our team too wasn't too good.
- WalterBright 3y ago
  Maybe I'm the only one who notices people whose work "just works". Those people are solid gold.
  - scioto 3y ago
    Well, if it "just works," then it wasn't that hard to do anyway. No raise for you.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      Your comment got me irrationally mad, until I picked up sarcasm. Thanks.
- optymizer 3y ago
  I don't do this for one reason - I cannot hold others to a high bar if most of my code is half-assed. I usually write my best code to show others it's possible to write good code and ship on time, with exceptions of course (and I usually document in code why its half assed)
- epolanski 3y ago
  There's a famous green text on 4chan, where a user tells he got a sysadmin job which was so boring he started crashing stuff left and right and blocking an entire office even for entire days. By the end of the day he would plug back something and come out the "servers room" saying he fixed that and get everybody's praise. Even got him two raises in the span of 18 months. That's how crazy it is. I know a variation of this sort of story, where a good sysadmin/DevOps team was halved and then the problems started. The company didn't have those issues exactly because they had a good surplus of eyes to handle everything. They realized only later the mistake.
  - watwut 3y ago
    I do not think you can trust everything you find on 4chan. Yes, dysfunctional companies exists. No, someone writing something on 4chan does not imply it ever happened.
    - wiseowise 3y ago
      > No, someone writing something on 4chan does not imply it ever happened. Neither does it imply that it never happened.
      - watwut 3y ago
        You cant use it as an argument, just like you cant use a fiction book as an argument.
        ziddoap 3y ago
        Parent post didn't cite it in an argument. They shared a story.
        watwut 3y ago
        Very likely fictional story which they tried to pass as a thing that happened.
    - 3y ago
- joshspankit 3y ago
  Is it important that no one knows it was the Rock Star’s fault in the beginning?
- sbdmmg 3y ago
  This is a slippery slope, IMHO. It can easily get you to be the next "tactical tornado" of your team (cf. John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design).
- mindentropy 3y ago
  I have seen so many people do this wherever I have worked. In fact there is another thing that they do i.e. when management pulls in the schedule they will meekly agree to it because they already know they are going to half-a$$ their code. Now they are heroes much before as they are "yes-men" and will be targeted for promotion. Swooping in to fix things just adds to their already loaded credentials. The ones who are honest and actually disagree are banished and their lives are made difficult. They are called all sorts of names the most important being "not a team player".
ortusdux 3y ago
See also: The Locksmith's Paradox - https://medium.com/@pk.patrick.kelly/the-locksmith-paradox-63591b32ccc6 https://medium.com/@pk.patrick.kelly/the-locksmith-paradox-6...
- Pikamander2 3y ago
  "When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
  - quickthrower2 3y ago
    There is a quote about the job being free but you are just paying for the 20 years experience. The opposite is the lemons market. It is why getting some wet building work done that is actually waterproof is a fucking dark art. Even the pros hiring pros get fucked because the “is waterproof” part is invisible.
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wolverine876 3y ago
Life and its rewards aren't perfect. Work with honest, intelligent people; genuinely do your best; your days will be much better and the odds will be with you.
- LordNibbler 3y ago
  reality feels like there is a mix of people with different motivations. I think the paradox exist because the odds are not clear
- InSteady 3y ago
  This is a great answer. The only thing I would add is that you can take mental note when you accomplish something that anticipates and preempts future needs and challenges. It is ok to make brief mention of these things from time to time when appropriate. If nothing more it helps coworkers and bosses realize that you are putting in some thought and effort for the needs of others and to make things go more smoothly behind the scenes. Doing this effectively requires tact. Try to mostly bring up your silent efforts casually, and be judicious about how often and in what situation you mention it. If it gets interpreted as an "I told you so," an excuse, self-importance, etc, then it will probably do more harm than good in terms of your standing with others. Might be helpful to some degree. But won't save you if your organization's culture simply doesn't value your work or more generally doesn't care about proactive, methodical improvements that have no flash or immediate payoff.
- zinssmeister 3y ago
  Great approach! For the past 2 years I keep experimenting with different ways to track day to day productivity. It has helped me tremendously in assessing how I should feel at the end of the day about my work day and the amount of time I put towards work. (I tend to overwork myself significantly). It is of course a lot harder to apply this approach to individual productivity tracking across my teams. But I do now believe, based on self experiments and within smaller teams, that there is generally a lack of visibility of knowledge worker productivity. Especially within larger companies. WFH and hybrid makes this more crucial to have for both management and self assessments on the IC level.
bmacho 3y ago
> Don't know how to deal with this paradox. Think that it is the management's fault if they misjudge you. They have the chance to judge you correctly, yet they misjudge you. Their fault entirely.
somethoughts 3y ago
One approach to showing value is as follows: 1.) Create a spreadsheet with all of the features of your group's/company's products(s) listed in rows. 2.) Create a column for every team member in the group and highlight the lead developers for each feature. 3.) Then ask each team member to add a checkmark in their column for every feature for which they would be willing to be on hook for 24x7 triage pager duty. Over the long term - the most valuable contributor(s) on the team will be the one(s) with the most checkmarks next to the features they led development on (i.e. they write understandable code and document well) combined with the most checkmarked rows in their column (i.e. they proactively seek to understand other peoples codebases).
- cutemonster 3y ago
  Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler features, and get more checkmarks What if the table in fact shows which people are best at dodging the hard work Combined with showing who has the most friends in the office (giving checkmarks to features built by one's friends)
  - godelski 3y ago
    > Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler features, and get more checkmarks This is kinda a well known phenomena in medicine[0]. Same with lawyers. I'm just reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley[1]. It's messed up and why everyone needs to be very careful with metrics and remember that metrics are only guides, not targets. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/doctors-avoiding-risky-operations-due-to-prosecution-threat-survey-finds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/doctors-avoi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0
  - somethoughts 3y ago
    Agree that there is probably room for improvement to such a process and still a great amount of subjectivity required and a presumption of good faith participants who aren't actively gaming the numbers. In general though even if some developers are gravitating to only projects that are simple/trivial, those wouldn't necessarily be differentiators because such projects would have checkmarks by other developers as well. Also it can help to have the Product Management team rank the features in terms of strategic importance and criticality to the functioning of the company. I'd say the biggest benefit of such a spreadsheet is to provide visibility to leadership about the bus factor of the team. Too often the critical projects are really only maintained by a few team members. There's no incentive for new team members to learn the "legacy" projects versus creating their own pet projec. Then the inevitable RIF or transition happens and the lack of long term support becomes an issue.
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hackerlight 3y ago
Really good bosses make up for this. They push teamwork and collaboration, but at the same time they know the details of what every individual is doing and how they each contribute to the whole, and they can ~accurately compensate/promote/terminate. This prevents demoralization of team members. Team members psychologically need to be recognized for their individual contribution. These bosses tend to be competent ICs who became team leads, they are best positioned to judge the ICs they manage because they themselves are masters at the craft.
quickthrower2 3y ago
Modern “agile” systems don’t work well with you. They want you to deliver X points of features in 2 weeks. Sounds like you’d be better off as a consultant? But then you need to do all that biz dev stuff! Or find a great CTO to work for (or be the CTO) who understands. You only need one job.
- epolanski 3y ago
  I always laughed about those X points targets. In the end people ended up simply inflating the value of stories. In my previous team I had to argue with a person that 2 story points to add translation keys were ridiculous. To which the EM argued that 2 was okay because he also needed to write few accompanying tests. I have nightmares thinking about this stuff. It was literally quicker to add the translation keys and that pointless test than to even discuss and vote the story and debate the points..
  - s-lambert 3y ago
    Company has a goal for 5% increased velocity, what they want: teams get more efficient at pushing stories through to completion, what they get: teams just estimate 5% higher.
    - johnnyanmac 3y ago
      Goodheart strikes again. And large companies will probably never learn, because at some critical mass it becomes less important to ship than it does to tell people how cool the product you want to ship is. Devs don't get paid for shipping outside of a short surge of stocks (which they proceed to not be able to take advantadge of because potential insider trading). Heck, some industries just let you go after you ship.
mattgreenrocks 3y ago
Work for yourself. The fewer bugs you create, the faster you iterate. And the faster you iterate, the better your chances of finding product/market fit.
atleastoptimal 3y ago
The solution is to be a shameless self-marketer of all the work you do.
- euroderf 3y ago
  This does seem like the antithesis of useful, productive engineering work.
  - atleastoptimal 3y ago
    Even spending 5% of your time self marketing has massive dividends on your career vs spending 0% of your time. The virtues of your skills aren't self evident.
    - euroderf 3y ago
      True. But when you're a smart kid and you get auto-noticed in school with no effort on your own part (aside from the academic effort!), maybe it's time to add a course like "Creating Your Own P.R... And Believing It Too" into the curriculum.
      - atleastoptimal 3y ago
        That's true, but everyone has to learn at some point. There's only a limited amount of attention in the world. Even the smartest are subject to the laws of human whims. The purpose of school and most vocational systems is to best advertise and direct the skills of those with the most potential to where their skills are suited best. However individual firms have their own needs and agendas, and often suffer from failures of pure meritocracy that their success allows them to go on without.
xyst 3y ago
Value is in the eye of the beholder is what I discover. Got to play the game. If you are an IC, you play it up with the right people. Those right people fight for you instead of the other way around. When the “we need to cut the fat” talks come around, suddenly you are not on the chopping block. But that also assumes the people fighting for you are not on the chopping block. Soft skills across the industry is highly under valued. Knowing when to pick a fight or hold your tongue is also important (ie, reading the room). I hate it but you got to do what you got to do to get that cheddar
ajmurmann 3y ago
Or worse: People get stuck quite frequently and ask you for help pretty quickly. You get everyone unstuck, but your own work falls behind and when your boss's boss asks for metrics on developers you have few points delivered and few LOC changed. Your boss tries to explain, but your head is the one that rolls next when layoffs happen.
- vasco 3y ago
  Great workers know when they can help others without falling behind themselves. Or have good communication skills to explain what they were doing.
  - guappa 3y ago
    Or are good at communicating and don't need to do anything because they can just lie.
    - vasco 3y ago
      Well at some point you expect some artifacts to show up, even if not just code, design docs, RFCs, code reviews, something. If there truly is nothing I don't think that's a viable way to contribute either. Sure one can "only help others" but all good engineers I've worked with can help others and still do their main tasks, and if they get to a point where they are a point of reference for everyone else and everyone else gets blocked without them this is a high priority thing to fix in the team, probably one of the highest priority things to fix.
      - guappa 3y ago
        I've seen management let bad engineers re-do projects from scratch 2 or 3 times. Because they blame bad requirements, poor choice of programming language, and whatever on all the issues that the project has. They eventually acquire enough experience to be able to produce something that sort-of works around the 3rd attempt. But thanks to how good they are at communicating, are considered by management to be good engineers. While doing a working project at the 1st try, without using this week's new framework and so on isn't as valued.
baxtr 3y ago
I think an underrated way to deal with this phenomenon is proper self-marketing. Talk endlessly what you have done to prevent catastrophe. Describe the avoided catastrophes vividly so that people get a clear picture.
- mcbishop 3y ago
  Better yet, be in a work culture where people happily give credit to and praise others.
- nhumrich 3y ago
  Sometimes you can't quantify actual avoided things. For example you can't prove that a regulation stove actually prevented what could have been a kitchen fire.
- thret 3y ago
  Self-promotion is incredibly difficult for some people.
  - marviel 3y ago
    fair, but it's better to point out the solution: "learn how to be better at self promotion" Do you have another solution to this issue?
    - dr_kiszonka 3y ago
      Find someone to champion your work. Also, if you aren't already, start praising others' work in the hopes that they will reciprocate.
      - elbear 3y ago
        The caveat to this is to make sure hope doesn't turn into expectation. Expectation can turn into sourness when the others don't reciprocate. Also, some people feel when you do something just because you expect something in exchange, and that tends to make them not reciprocate.
welder 3y ago
Quit your job and work for yourself.
cjbgkagh 3y ago
I've done that as an hourly contractor, I fixed their 6 month problem on my first day, I hoped they would then hire me for more hours on other stuff but they were like nope, that was all we needed. They did tell some other companies that I was good at this kind of stuff but nothing came of it. My first and last day in contracting for small companies.
- damianh 3y ago
  The trick is to do these sort of engagements as a fixed price contract. You could have probably done an assessment in a hour or two. Then you charge on what you estimate is the value to the company.
  - cjbgkagh 3y ago
    I should have, but it would have been obvious that I pulled a fast one on them as the fix was really quite simple. Instead of building a Hadoop cluster I replace a sql sub query with a bitmask. It really only took an hour to figure it out but they let me charge the whole day.
    - cced 3y ago
      How much was it costing them? Also, can you describe the problem? It sounds interesting.
      - cjbgkagh 3y ago
        It was $200 an hour for a total of 8 hours. They had a team of 5 working for six months on it and they planed to spend another six months on it. The UI had options to check some categories and exclude others, this was mapped to sql with a nested query IN (…) and not in (…). I noticed that there were less than 64 categories and always will be so I figured pack the category membership into a 64bit ints and use bitwise operations. The UI query generation would map to use bitmasks instead. They didn’t even let me implement it, just agreed that it would work and took it from there. I think they were quite embarrassed by it. It ended up being 10K faster.
aswanson 3y ago
No one knows your true value but yourself. Move accordingly.
agumonkey 3y ago
Me neither. And I've had a similar issue with the first case. You do your work and help someone finish theirs, people still think you only did you job (even if people do credit you, you still have normal impact). The psychology of workplace is quite subtle and almost backward. There's a motto "squeaky wheel gets the grease" .. to the point I'm thinking of trying some games. Like designers who produce crappy options and one good to toy with higher ups thinking they decide. There are some ideas in that vein so you flip the relationship and benefit from it instead of bleeding.
PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
That's not true, your value is clear just subtle. If your solutions tend to be more stable from the get-go, it will get noticed at most places. There are always going to be that odd company where that's not true, but in my experience, simply doing higher quality work gets appreciated.
- wildrhythms 3y ago
  Well it's not 'clear' when every promotional process I've encountered doesn't reward such forward-thinking preventative maintenance compared to someone who postures themselves as a hero going around putting out manufactured fires.
  - PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
    cynicism is easy.
eschneider 3y ago
It's mostly a question of finding organizations that recognize and value that sort of contribution. It also helps if you track who you work with and what you help out on every day, so when review time comes along you can list not only your 'regular job' wins, but all the wins you helped teammates get.
hinkley 3y ago
The problem with doing something right the first time is nobody appreciates how hard it was.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
madrox 3y ago
Think of it this way: when a principal engineer is hired from outside the company, what is the forecasted value of that engineer? How was that determined, since they have yet to do anything? If Andrej Karpathy joined your AI startup, people won't say this person has unclear value. It's because of the impact they've had previously and what other people have to say about that person. Value is your reputation.
ignoramous 3y ago
> Don't know how to deal Good leaders. Or, worse: Consultants. That is, it takes either an outsider or a self-critical leader to affect change? Those doing the planning are always optimistic [0] about their decisions, processes, evaluations, and progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy [0] not always bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_hand_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_hand_principle
QuantumGood 3y ago
It's always worth making some effort at promoting your value; no one else is likely to do it for you.
a012 3y ago
My anecdata is to be vocal about your works, like having short knowledge sharing sessions to show it to your team/manager. Don’t be afraid of little things, your team would learn something from it.
- rapfaria 3y ago
  Agreed but selling your work is an art. Sometimes folks try and sell it so often that it makes me wonder if they are really getting anything done. Having a boss that loves to sell his team's work to his boss also works wonders.
lr4444lr 3y ago
I hate to ask the obvious question, but maybe your job title is wrong?
jstarfish 3y ago
Play to your leadership. Exceptions apply, but female bosses tend to appreciate averted crises more than male ones. If your boss is male, let shit fail. You'll get hero points for responding to incidents. A female boss will quickly suspect incompetence if things keep breaking (i.e. see how far half-assed DIY home repairs get you with your wife before she loses patience with you). Your hero points will come from mitigation. This paradox comes up a lot in security. IME in this particular field the gender stuff is less relevant since everyone is paranoid. But when we run stuff up to C-levels, it's only the female execs and lawyers that really stop to consider possible issues-- the men just dismiss everything until it happens.
Spooky23 3y ago
I think there’s a “this is life” aspect and a “this organization is immature aspect”. A mature organization respects the process that prevents getting stuck for 3 months. But… they may be more stable and less nimble. Boring orgs don’t like heroes.
lumost 3y ago
The problem may be in the relative value contribution. A senior eng that rights a project on 3 days which had been going on for 6 months is incredibly high value/he work. A Sr eng who spends 6 months coaching a junior engineer has much lower value/hour.
bruce511 3y ago
Presumably that's not -all- you do? Or did you sit around for 3 months going quietly mad waiting? Assuming you are doing other things make sure that is visible. Also why did your colleague wait 3 months to ask you for help? A couple days would be OK, a month would be crazy. You should poll them and not wait for an interrupt.
johnnyanmac 3y ago
Security/insurance paradox: when you do some jobs perfectly, it feels like you're doing nothing. Sadly, the only (ethical) way to counter such narrative is to spend a good amount of your time making reports showing how well everything is working and how it's not something you can just operate autonomously without disaster (to answer the inevitable "well the job is done, what are we paying you for?)
- staunton 3y ago
  How do you get people to read such reports?
puchatek 3y ago
An adjacent problem is how to know that you've really prevented issues/others from getting stuck with whatever you were working on. No system is perfect and engineering is also an art of knowing when to skip which corners. If nobody sees value in your preventive work then maybe there isn't any?
fendy3002 3y ago
Other problem on similar spectrum, when you have a good performance and your boss notice you, their expectations can increase and increase until you unable to deliver, then suddenly you're bad.
greesil 3y ago
Having a carefree life of no technical debt is not its own reward? Firefighting is stressful :)
SilkRoadie 3y ago
I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Came back to find the team had spent a week on a 5 minute task that had been clearly documented. Nothing had moved forward. Spoke to my manager that day and from that day forward it was clear what my value was. Eventually lead the team and helped the team develop processes and initiative so they could be productive in my absence. Up until that point I knew my value but I don’t think anyone else quite got it.
loceng 3y ago
At least you're likely not a person who works at a freelance agency where you purposefully do poor work or break things, so then you can bill more time "fixing" the problem - until the client gets the wiser at least, or there's another more oblivious client you can grift much more easily who doesn't know better? The above seems to be how the top billing agencies on Upwork function, with fewer staff you can grift more people because the hours being billed aren't honest, and so you can have more clients and reach the "top" earnings position faster and more easily; with the same practices existing at least on one of the two prior platforms before oDesk and Elance merged.
threatripper 3y ago
If they don't pay you to fix those problems then don't fix those problems until they start paying you for it. You'll have to deal with the psychological torture of watching things go horribly wrong. So it's up to you how to deal with it.
throwaway2037 3y ago
Don't help anyone too much until a manager asks you to help. If someone is really pressing help, tell them that you are busy, but they can ask the manager to tell me to help. This way, you always get maximum credit. Every single manager that I have worked for claimed they were "different" and did not suffer from it. Usually, I give them many chances to see my value. After I am overlooked too many times, I revert to this selfish mode explained previously. In all such cases, my recognition from the manager improves. Sigh.
- Lutger 3y ago
  I don't know about that, you might want to receive some help yourself right? In some cases it might be better to work at a place that values cooperation more than competition. You sound like you would thrive better at such a work culture. However, often leads just need something in order to know what you are doing, especially managers that don't really closely work together with their team. It can help to just mention it to your lead. Because it is easy to see what you done, but not how you have helped somebody. Just mention it in whatever recurrent meeting you have. And if helping out takes more time, I'd say it is only fair to have whoever is responsible for delivery involved in prioritization, because then it is at the detriment of whatever you are working on, which might be more important. Often, it takes less than 15-30 minutes to help somebody get unstuck. I wouldn't enjoy working at a place where people would refuse to help me with something like that, or I would be so pressed to achieve things that I can't spare 30 minutes out of my day to help someone out.
kymki 3y ago
The educational system i was put through was set up to teach that outcome scales more or less linearly with effort and time. The first lesson after graduation is that this is not so. Increased effort and time most likely primarily yields more effort and time being expected of you with lagging compensation. Value and opportunity are chaotic processes in effort and time. All we can do is to try to maintain the levels of workload such that we have clarity of mind to seize opportunities when they reveal themselves. Honest and balanced colleagues help there, but that is ultimately a missions for yourself only.
- aquarkortwo 3y ago
  Helpful partners and friends who try to find opportunities most definitely can help (and in unbalanced relationships, can do it all), like the market research team at a startup.
mirekrusin 3y ago
Time. Your value will emerge with time. Just keep calm and carry on. Good and bad times will do their usual sinusoidal dance but your slope will be pointing up if you zoom out. There will be unfair promotions outside of your team, reductions or freezes in yours (companies have tendency to throw people at problems = inflate dysfunctional parts; if you have well performing team - they won’t let you grow short term; just wait it out, they will eventually).
hef19898 3y ago
If the headline were actually true... Agree with your point, solving problems gets you points, avoiding them doesn't. My cynical view of the headline is, that a lot of people do get credit for solving problems that never really existed, simply either fabricating (intentionally or not) easy to solve problems or vastly overblowing problems they just happen to have a "solution" for. If ypu successfully fight a fire, you are a hero, if you prevent fires it is just normal and nothing special.
koliber 3y ago
It's possible to phrase the value proposition to align with what you want to deliver. You can phrase it as "I help teams deliver on time by making sure they don't get stuck." Or "I increase a team's velocity by preventing mistakes that stop work." It's how you sell yourself and then, how you tell the story of what happened. Being able to tell a compelling story is important.
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  The issue is how do you provide the evidence for that. In other terms, how do you differentiate your effect from that of Homer Simpson's Bear Patrol and Lisa's tiger-repellant rock [0]? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
  - Lutger 3y ago
    It is really really hard to do that in a context where its not embedded in either work culture or appreciated by your lead. It is easy enough to 'measure', a good lead would value how you benefit the team and enhance your co-workers productivity and seek to understand this part of your contribution. He or she could just ask your peers, it is not science. If this does not apply to your situation at all, then leave because no amount of evidence will ever force your superiors to accept it, it will only antagonize them. You do need to make your case sometimes, but the level of proof should not be that high, you need some trust in order to function as an org even if it is exploited sometimes.
sparrowInHand 3y ago
Your value gets revealed in your absence. To leave and the company tanks- is a expression of the value shadow you throw.
teekert 3y ago
It’s dealt with by knowledgeable managers that recognize and award your skill according. If you don’t have such a manager, perhaps find them. Or become them.
figassis 3y ago
Your managers need to understand the work that you're doing. When I review someone's code and I see them fixing something potentially catastrophic but that never happened, I definitely remember that and congratulate them. When I see a team member ask a question that makes me or the team rethink implementation strategy. That is very valuable. When a code reviewer finds a potentially critical bug in my code, or just a nuanced bug, I remember and appreciate. Because I fully understand that those are potential p0 or p1 issues. And great engineers are consistently good at this type of passive, keeping the lights on work, but it does not reflect on their quantifiable work, so orgs do not include this in performance reviews. It is up to your manager to recognize this and advocate for you.
- zeroonetwothree 3y ago
  Even when they do recognize it it’s unlikely to be weighed the same as the engineer who heroically stays up all night fixing a critical issue. Especially with many organizations focused on data or metrics for performance reviews or promotions being able to say you fixed an outage that was costing $X million per hour comes across much better than a vague counterfactual notion that your high code quality prevented Y such outages in the first place.
darylteo 3y ago
I am dealing with similar. I can provide solutions 10x faster than anyone. Everyone looks up to me, and are dependent on me for solutions to everything. However it is clear that noone is improving and that the process IS me. What I've been trying to do is make sure that my scope and role is fully clarified, and any "extra" activity that I perform is documented and flagged. Anything that becomes a "common" activity implies a missing part of the process - be it a role that is missing, or a skillset that is lacking. Before you start thinking that it is pretentious or self serving, it's perhaps the opposite - you owe it to the process and the team/business/organisation to make them see what you're putting in, else they fail to find the gap. It's not paid off yet, but hopefully it will yield results within the next 6 months.
- legendofbrando 3y ago
  I do hope you’re recognized. One piece of advice, I found myself this person once - it’s the road to burn out city to be the critical path answer to everyone on the team’s challenges. You sound like someone who is very generous with your time and support. In my experience once people have found a critical path there is no point at which they “stop.” This isn’t because they’re trying to hurt you, they’ve just found the answer so to them it doesn’t seem wrong. It will take even more of your time, but you ought to consider practicing giving less answers and asking more questions of those who seek your help to try to help them unpack the issues themselves. It will feel more tiring at first, but you’ll gradually help the others learn and also create a small bit of friction that will encourage them to try their own solution or two before seeking you. Management asks are separate/ they can actually reward you with compensation and promotions for this extra work. But the team asking for help won’t stop when you get more comp unless you start teaching that you’re not the answer.
  - darylteo 3y ago
    Really does help to hear this, thank you.
popcorncowboy 3y ago
Depending on your context, if you are at the top of the foodchain as described here, minus the recognition for it, one option is to simply add grist to the mill. Creative problems you can leave for the team to sweat and for you to come and slamdunk.
JohnClark1337 3y ago
[dead]
chaboud 3y ago
1. Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said “A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s”. 2. Environments where people can’t tell the difference between 1x and 1000x engineers lead to performative work and arsonist firefighting. 3. When folks in your organization can’t recognize (and reward) high impact, it’s probably time to get out, largely due to the first two points.
TeeMassive 3y ago
The lean mantra "Make work visible" is not only good at an organization level but also as professional feedback level. Although if used openly for promotions it will cease to be a good metric.
dimal 3y ago
Go into consulting.
indigochill 3y ago
> When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Well, a problem that hasn't happened yet is a risk, right? So you can apply risk assessment math to it: Value = Estimated risk of the problem occurring * Cost if it happens
scooke 3y ago
I'm currently in an unrelated field, but with a similar tension of unclear value while things work. The way to deal with this has been to keep a tally of checks on important systems, whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, with links to undesired outcomes should the process that has been checked fail. This list of you checking the processes is one way to "prove" your value, at least for ppl who wouldn't necessarily understand naturally.

jvanderbot 3y ago

Unfortunately one of the best ways is to toot your own horn. If you work with good folks, it will be appreciated for you to present a tricky problem you solved, or to present a design you put forth that would save everyone time.

runamuck 3y ago

Easy - half a$$ your code and when it breaks - swoop in, "fix things" (actually do it right) and play the role of hero! (I've seen so-called "Rock Stars" at places I worked do this over and over)

samstave 3y ago
For i in employment ensure there is someone who checks in with me every month when they read this line of code, else, stop code from running so they come to me.
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
Would you feel good about being that kind of engineer, if the external validation was great enough?
- circusfly 3y ago
  It's OK, the new validation method is AI driven, we're good.
- sodapopcan 3y ago
  When the external validation is monetary then you gotta do what you gotta do.
- tmtvl 3y ago
  There are people with integrity and principles; and then there are people who can pay their rent every month.
  - Aeolun 3y ago
    I was kinda happy when my company replaced their previous feel good nonsense ‘principles’ with ‘do the right thing, even when nobody is looking’. Of course it doesn’t change anything about the people that work there, but the people at the top now clearly have a better idea of how it works than the last ones :P
- Asooka 3y ago
  We review each other's code before it goes in. If the team says they're happy to work with it, then I've fulfilled my obligation. I am literally not paid to write the best code in the world. In fact, the company gives bonuses for fixing things, so they are in fact paying me to sneak bugs in. What you do though is, you leave a very obscure edge case unhandled, make note of it, then just don't tell anyone. Invariably someone will hit it exactly one day before you're scheduled to go live. Then just apply the fix (make sure to procrastinate long enough to simulate working on it) and voila! The longest I've seen an edge case go unfixed in this manner has been three years. Though truth be told I'm not smart enough to add bugs on purpose, I just sometimes notice I've failed to address an edge case and ... leave it. If it turns out to be important - I can fix it when the fix's value is maximum. Half my day is spent fixing others' unhandled edge cases, so it's nice to have one tucked away for a rainy day that you know you can fix easily.
  - jddj 3y ago
    How bizarre. I guess I can count myself lucky that I don't seem to live in that particular world. Is the problem the incentive itself, eg. if they didn't reward fixed bugs would you write better (even just better communicated) code?
  - BobbyTables2 3y ago
    I can see how many would object to what you’re suggesting. However, I’ve also had managers who pushed back against nice-to-have cleanups as the product matured (especially close to a release). They had cause as the product became overly complex, where issues were tedious to root cause and fix. I tended to queue up a lot of improvements and then unleash them at the beginning of a release cycle. Later QA would find a problem in the previous release but couldn’t reproduce in the later one… because I had already fixed it. I didn’t introduce bugs intentionally, and the fixes were visible as we had to backport them for point releases, etc.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  You mean money? Abso-fucking-lately I would do it. Moral points don’t pay my mortgage.
SilasX 3y ago
Hah, that was in my archetypal description of the fake 10xer, that somehow they are able to swoop in and fix their spaghetti code, come what may, while no one else can make sense of it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18462325
Jtsummers 3y ago
Don't do it right, double down on the flaws. You had a 3k SLOC single function (all in main) C program to do something that could be expressed cleanly and clearly in 200 SLOC. Some specific sequence of inputs leads to an error. Instead of tidying it up, removing the repetition that led to the mistake, you copy/paste everything again and add another 100 cases to your various switch/case statements (actually you use if/else because switch/case might make things clearer). The specific problem is solved, but in a year another buggy code path will be discovered and you'll have another chance to play hero. In 5 years it'll be 50k SLOC of C all in main, that could have been under 1k SLOC (still all in main). No one else will be able to fix it but you!
- actionfromafar 3y ago
  For extra points, keep the sane solution in a secret source file, then implement a compiler which generates the obfuscated spaghetti. :-P
  - agumonkey 3y ago
    and enjoy your participation to the ioccc :)
  - Jtsummers 3y ago
    I kind of did that once. For a proprietary language that didn't support functions and had very limited support for loops (mostly labels and gotos, it is sold for way too much per seat for a niche industry and the language and implementation are awful). I needed to implement something that was too tedious to write out by hand (~1500 lines of this nonsense) so I made a Python program that spit out the code I needed. The company that makes it also has a generator they use when they're contracted to make more code in their awful language. It's bad, the code has to be manually cleaned up and sometimes is delivered broken. Then they get the money on the support contract to fix their problems. (It's not their only product/service, but it's key to many of their services, a way of hooking customers.) Their generator did not using the looping constructs, and several of their "senior" engineers actively discouraged it because "You can't be sure a loop will do what you want it to do." (Wish that weren't an actual quote.)
farhanhubble 3y ago
This is exactly what happens at many software companies. People,sometimes under pressure to meet deadlines, apply totally crazy fixes to stop one problem and create new problems.
- withinboredom 3y ago
  I’ve seen it both ways. In one case dev spends 3 days refactoring code beautifully to fix the bug; ships to production only to find out that it wasn’t the only bug in this code path. Now they spend another 2 days refactoring before repeating the process and so on. Meanwhile, the company is losing money/customers/favorite vanity metric/whatever. Or. Dev hacks a fix up, sends to prod. Sees another bug and fixes immediately. No loss in revenue/customers/favorite vanity metric/whatever. Dev creates ticket to refactor/fix code properly and adds to next sprint. PM removes from next sprint to get capacity for further resume driven management projects. Issue crops up again due to hack. Original dev is now able to do ticket originally removed from sprint.
  - farhanhubble 3y ago
    Definitely. Like so many other things it's the spirit and intent that matter.
sharess 3y ago
Another option is to work at a consultancy where you hop aboard a new customer project every 3-6 months. Approach every customer as an opportunity to do some resume-driven development and pick a bunch of untested new technologies to experiment with. Be sure to do at least a couple of presentations to tell everyone about the hottest new things you are doing to bring value to the customers. Leave the project once it slowly starts sinking and then just keep hopping from customer to customer. You will be far away once the sea water starts coming through the windows and the non-technical people directing these projects will never figure out what you did. I have seen that this is one of the most efficient ways to advance your career especially in larger consultancy companies with hundreds or thousands of different customers.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  For maximum results, trade-off with a buddy: Spend Q1 each crashing your respective project; spend Q2 as a fixer undoing that damage using his knowledge of his own work. You’re both cutting edge and a proven fixer!
  - kitd 3y ago
    Reminds me of The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Tuco is a wanted man, Blondie brings him in and gets the reward money. Then just as Tuco is about to hang, Blondie shoots the rope and they both escape to another state ... where Tuco is also a wanted man.
  - acdha 3y ago
    Government contracting is the pathological case for that: if they haven’t been allowed to hire civil servants, they have no choice but to use a handful of big companies. The shortage of in-house expertise makes it hard to know if the work is being planned or performed correctly so a common strategy is to hire one company to oversee the work of another company. Unfortunately, since there are only a few companies in the space and job hopping is the best path for a raise or to avoid layoffs when contracts turn over, it’s rare for anyone to be very critical of past or future coworkers.
ponector 3y ago
It is more easy: do your job right, but do not comment, fix or somehow improve work of your colleagues. Let them fail, aknowledge failure and only then come with fix, get all praise. Never point to the possible issues at the code reviews, retirement refinements etc.
- zmgsabst 3y ago
  This, but seriously: Let your junior colleagues fail on a schedule within the margin of error on your planning, but keep a close enough eye on them so you know how to bail it out if they can’t pull it together with a little extra time/guidance. Okay — still give good code reviews, but if you let them face-plant a little on design, etc, then they get experience. And you don’t look dumb when it turns out they were right. But you do look like a hero when they’re struggling to get across the line, and you whisk in to fix it.
  - necrotic_comp 3y ago
    This is also just good practice in general. You learn through struggle, so giving juniors a safety net (when they don't know they have it), is a good way to get them up the curve.
- ozim 3y ago
  That is naive take, you really think if you work hard on improving code, pointing out flaws, there will never be any issues? In reality that I live, there is never enough time, if you have 3-4 team mates pumping features out, it is already impossible to prevent every problem and review every piece of code. I don't have to be cynical about it, it just happens that issues will crop up over time and I am there to fix them and there is never enough time to prevent them up-front, because if you will try then you will never deliver anything. Ship fast and break things is maybe too far - but still shipping something beats not shipping ideal state.
  - UK-AL 3y ago
    We have a very good test suite, I don't think there's been a bad release in years.
godelski 3y ago
I don't think you're wrong, but god what a waste of time. Can't we just fix the actual problem?
- hinkley 3y ago
  One middle ground I've found is to write tools or processes for myself or a mentee, with the intention to avoid avoidable problems. And then use the next time someone breaks things as an opportunity to advertise the preventative measure. Frequently I end up having to do one more PR to get the tool to correct the exact problem the team experienced, so in practical terms is much less of a 'witholding' and more of a 'burning in' situation. But the final product does end up getting written in hours instead of days so while I don't get the credit I feel entitled to for foresight, I get mis-attributed with being able to solve difficult problems quickly. Which is kinda true. I hate being caught flat footed so I'm always squirreling away fragments of a Plan C.
- wiseowise 3y ago
  How?
Scoundreller 3y ago
don't even need to half a$$ it, just use timebombs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_bomb_(software) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_bomb_(software) Usually only works if you're the only dev, unless you get creative with counters like the original devs that made some nice cash fixing it all for y2k (officially: don't do this)
- kevindamm 3y ago
  2038 is getting closer every year...
- staunton 3y ago
  The AI will analyze your codebase next year and the company will sue you if you do stuff like that...
darth_avocado 3y ago
That's literally how promo packs work in FAANG (minus the N) and other adjacent tech companies.
- goodpoint 3y ago
  Nope.
agumonkey 3y ago
I was just considering it, but never had a chance to see it in real life. I'm dumbfounded about all this, you spend years learning and reading books about the craft but the only topic which will matter is how you can con the game ?.. weird.
hinkley 3y ago
Having people thank me for being 'on top of' a problem that I already know about because I'm the one who pushed the button that broke it... It's gross. It feels gross. Much happier when I can fix something quickly because I have some tools or logic in the codebase already that lets me do something quickly by being covered with sanity checks so I can zip along without driving us off a cliff.
- staunton 3y ago
  There's some people who break something, realize it, just leave it as is, and cannot comprehend why you would think they should maybe help fix it... So I'd guess the praise is for not being like that.
  - hinkley 3y ago
    I see what you're saying, but that still feels like a participation trophy to me.
cloverich 3y ago
In high school I actually had a friend teach me this in a humorous way. In football we did sprints (the kind where you physically run) at the end. He said -- half ass the sprints. Then on the last sprint, run as fast as you can, you'll have more energy left, and when they see you running fastest you'll get all the credit. He was doing it as a joke, but lo and behold he out runs everyone on the last sprint by a lot, and the coach specifically pulls him aside as an example of how everyone else should carry themselves. He's one of my favorite pranksters. But needless to say, the football team was not very good.
- pintxo 3y ago
  Nice example for the (common?) inability of many managers to assess performance realistically.
- bluGill 3y ago
  In the case of football that might actually be a good lesson: save enough energy for the end of the game so that you can play best when the other team is tired. Of course you need to play the whole game, but if you play all but the last 5 minutes working just hard enough to keep a tie game, then you can pull ahead in the end. This only works in time limited sports though. Most real world situations are not time limited like that and so the advice doesn't apply.
  - braingravy 3y ago
    That really only works if the other team is terrible relative to your own. ‘Playing to tie’ a team that is an even match (or close to an even match) results in a competitive advantage for their side. This does work ok for long distance competitive running, since the factors at play are time and metabolic rate and is missing the strategy present in team based ball sports like football, soccer, basketball, etc.
  - mmsimanga 3y ago
    On sprint training. Me and a friend figured out that if you moved your arms fast whilst not running a full sprint it gave the appearance that you were trying very hard and coach didn't give you a hard time. Like most slackers instead of using the trick once in a while we over did it and the coach soon figured it out. The result was even more sprints. Needless to say our team too wasn't too good.
WalterBright 3y ago
Maybe I'm the only one who notices people whose work "just works". Those people are solid gold.
- scioto 3y ago
  Well, if it "just works," then it wasn't that hard to do anyway. No raise for you.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    Your comment got me irrationally mad, until I picked up sarcasm. Thanks.
optymizer 3y ago
I don't do this for one reason - I cannot hold others to a high bar if most of my code is half-assed. I usually write my best code to show others it's possible to write good code and ship on time, with exceptions of course (and I usually document in code why its half assed)
epolanski 3y ago
There's a famous green text on 4chan, where a user tells he got a sysadmin job which was so boring he started crashing stuff left and right and blocking an entire office even for entire days. By the end of the day he would plug back something and come out the "servers room" saying he fixed that and get everybody's praise. Even got him two raises in the span of 18 months. That's how crazy it is. I know a variation of this sort of story, where a good sysadmin/DevOps team was halved and then the problems started. The company didn't have those issues exactly because they had a good surplus of eyes to handle everything. They realized only later the mistake.
- watwut 3y ago
  I do not think you can trust everything you find on 4chan. Yes, dysfunctional companies exists. No, someone writing something on 4chan does not imply it ever happened.
  - wiseowise 3y ago
    > No, someone writing something on 4chan does not imply it ever happened. Neither does it imply that it never happened.
    - watwut 3y ago
      You cant use it as an argument, just like you cant use a fiction book as an argument.
      - ziddoap 3y ago
        Parent post didn't cite it in an argument. They shared a story.
        watwut 3y ago
        Very likely fictional story which they tried to pass as a thing that happened.
  - 3y ago
joshspankit 3y ago
Is it important that no one knows it was the Rock Star’s fault in the beginning?
sbdmmg 3y ago
This is a slippery slope, IMHO. It can easily get you to be the next "tactical tornado" of your team (cf. John Ousterhout, A Philosophy of Software Design).
mindentropy 3y ago
I have seen so many people do this wherever I have worked. In fact there is another thing that they do i.e. when management pulls in the schedule they will meekly agree to it because they already know they are going to half-a$$ their code. Now they are heroes much before as they are "yes-men" and will be targeted for promotion. Swooping in to fix things just adds to their already loaded credentials. The ones who are honest and actually disagree are banished and their lives are made difficult. They are called all sorts of names the most important being "not a team player".

ortusdux 3y ago

See also: The Locksmith's Paradox - https://medium.com/@pk.patrick.kelly/the-locksmith-paradox-63591b32ccc6 https://medium.com/@pk.patrick.kelly/the-locksmith-paradox-6...

Pikamander2 3y ago
"When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all."
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  There is a quote about the job being free but you are just paying for the 20 years experience. The opposite is the lemons market. It is why getting some wet building work done that is actually waterproof is a fucking dark art. Even the pros hiring pros get fucked because the “is waterproof” part is invisible.

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wolverine876 3y ago

Life and its rewards aren't perfect. Work with honest, intelligent people; genuinely do your best; your days will be much better and the odds will be with you.

LordNibbler 3y ago
reality feels like there is a mix of people with different motivations. I think the paradox exist because the odds are not clear
InSteady 3y ago
This is a great answer. The only thing I would add is that you can take mental note when you accomplish something that anticipates and preempts future needs and challenges. It is ok to make brief mention of these things from time to time when appropriate. If nothing more it helps coworkers and bosses realize that you are putting in some thought and effort for the needs of others and to make things go more smoothly behind the scenes. Doing this effectively requires tact. Try to mostly bring up your silent efforts casually, and be judicious about how often and in what situation you mention it. If it gets interpreted as an "I told you so," an excuse, self-importance, etc, then it will probably do more harm than good in terms of your standing with others. Might be helpful to some degree. But won't save you if your organization's culture simply doesn't value your work or more generally doesn't care about proactive, methodical improvements that have no flash or immediate payoff.
zinssmeister 3y ago
Great approach! For the past 2 years I keep experimenting with different ways to track day to day productivity. It has helped me tremendously in assessing how I should feel at the end of the day about my work day and the amount of time I put towards work. (I tend to overwork myself significantly). It is of course a lot harder to apply this approach to individual productivity tracking across my teams. But I do now believe, based on self experiments and within smaller teams, that there is generally a lack of visibility of knowledge worker productivity. Especially within larger companies. WFH and hybrid makes this more crucial to have for both management and self assessments on the IC level.

bmacho 3y ago

> Don't know how to deal with this paradox. Think that it is the management's fault if they misjudge you. They have the chance to judge you correctly, yet they misjudge you. Their fault entirely.

somethoughts 3y ago

One approach to showing value is as follows: 1.) Create a spreadsheet with all of the features of your group's/company's products(s) listed in rows. 2.) Create a column for every team member in the group and highlight the lead developers for each feature. 3.) Then ask each team member to add a checkmark in their column for every feature for which they would be willing to be on hook for 24x7 triage pager duty. Over the long term - the most valuable contributor(s) on the team will be the one(s) with the most checkmarks next to the features they led development on (i.e. they write understandable code and document well) combined with the most checkmarked rows in their column (i.e. they proactively seek to understand other peoples codebases).

cutemonster 3y ago
Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler features, and get more checkmarks What if the table in fact shows which people are best at dodging the hard work Combined with showing who has the most friends in the office (giving checkmarks to features built by one's friends)
- godelski 3y ago
  > Couldn't there then be a risk that now some people want to avoid higher risk projects, and just build the simpler features, and get more checkmarks This is kinda a well known phenomena in medicine[0]. Same with lawyers. I'm just reminded of this scene from Silicon Valley[1]. It's messed up and why everyone needs to be very careful with metrics and remember that metrics are only guides, not targets. [0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/doctors-avoiding-risky-operations-due-to-prosecution-threat-survey-finds https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/jan/29/doctors-avoi... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5sTbjO3eI_0
- somethoughts 3y ago
  Agree that there is probably room for improvement to such a process and still a great amount of subjectivity required and a presumption of good faith participants who aren't actively gaming the numbers. In general though even if some developers are gravitating to only projects that are simple/trivial, those wouldn't necessarily be differentiators because such projects would have checkmarks by other developers as well. Also it can help to have the Product Management team rank the features in terms of strategic importance and criticality to the functioning of the company. I'd say the biggest benefit of such a spreadsheet is to provide visibility to leadership about the bus factor of the team. Too often the critical projects are really only maintained by a few team members. There's no incentive for new team members to learn the "legacy" projects versus creating their own pet projec. Then the inevitable RIF or transition happens and the lack of long term support becomes an issue.

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hackerlight 3y ago

Really good bosses make up for this. They push teamwork and collaboration, but at the same time they know the details of what every individual is doing and how they each contribute to the whole, and they can ~accurately compensate/promote/terminate. This prevents demoralization of team members. Team members psychologically need to be recognized for their individual contribution. These bosses tend to be competent ICs who became team leads, they are best positioned to judge the ICs they manage because they themselves are masters at the craft.

quickthrower2 3y ago

Modern “agile” systems don’t work well with you. They want you to deliver X points of features in 2 weeks. Sounds like you’d be better off as a consultant? But then you need to do all that biz dev stuff! Or find a great CTO to work for (or be the CTO) who understands. You only need one job.

epolanski 3y ago
I always laughed about those X points targets. In the end people ended up simply inflating the value of stories. In my previous team I had to argue with a person that 2 story points to add translation keys were ridiculous. To which the EM argued that 2 was okay because he also needed to write few accompanying tests. I have nightmares thinking about this stuff. It was literally quicker to add the translation keys and that pointless test than to even discuss and vote the story and debate the points..
- s-lambert 3y ago
  Company has a goal for 5% increased velocity, what they want: teams get more efficient at pushing stories through to completion, what they get: teams just estimate 5% higher.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    Goodheart strikes again. And large companies will probably never learn, because at some critical mass it becomes less important to ship than it does to tell people how cool the product you want to ship is. Devs don't get paid for shipping outside of a short surge of stocks (which they proceed to not be able to take advantadge of because potential insider trading). Heck, some industries just let you go after you ship.

mattgreenrocks 3y ago

Work for yourself. The fewer bugs you create, the faster you iterate. And the faster you iterate, the better your chances of finding product/market fit.

atleastoptimal 3y ago

The solution is to be a shameless self-marketer of all the work you do.

euroderf 3y ago
This does seem like the antithesis of useful, productive engineering work.
- atleastoptimal 3y ago
  Even spending 5% of your time self marketing has massive dividends on your career vs spending 0% of your time. The virtues of your skills aren't self evident.
  - euroderf 3y ago
    True. But when you're a smart kid and you get auto-noticed in school with no effort on your own part (aside from the academic effort!), maybe it's time to add a course like "Creating Your Own P.R... And Believing It Too" into the curriculum.
    - atleastoptimal 3y ago
      That's true, but everyone has to learn at some point. There's only a limited amount of attention in the world. Even the smartest are subject to the laws of human whims. The purpose of school and most vocational systems is to best advertise and direct the skills of those with the most potential to where their skills are suited best. However individual firms have their own needs and agendas, and often suffer from failures of pure meritocracy that their success allows them to go on without.

xyst 3y ago

Value is in the eye of the beholder is what I discover. Got to play the game. If you are an IC, you play it up with the right people. Those right people fight for you instead of the other way around. When the “we need to cut the fat” talks come around, suddenly you are not on the chopping block. But that also assumes the people fighting for you are not on the chopping block. Soft skills across the industry is highly under valued. Knowing when to pick a fight or hold your tongue is also important (ie, reading the room). I hate it but you got to do what you got to do to get that cheddar

ajmurmann 3y ago

Or worse: People get stuck quite frequently and ask you for help pretty quickly. You get everyone unstuck, but your own work falls behind and when your boss's boss asks for metrics on developers you have few points delivered and few LOC changed. Your boss tries to explain, but your head is the one that rolls next when layoffs happen.

vasco 3y ago
Great workers know when they can help others without falling behind themselves. Or have good communication skills to explain what they were doing.
- guappa 3y ago
  Or are good at communicating and don't need to do anything because they can just lie.
  - vasco 3y ago
    Well at some point you expect some artifacts to show up, even if not just code, design docs, RFCs, code reviews, something. If there truly is nothing I don't think that's a viable way to contribute either. Sure one can "only help others" but all good engineers I've worked with can help others and still do their main tasks, and if they get to a point where they are a point of reference for everyone else and everyone else gets blocked without them this is a high priority thing to fix in the team, probably one of the highest priority things to fix.
    - guappa 3y ago
      I've seen management let bad engineers re-do projects from scratch 2 or 3 times. Because they blame bad requirements, poor choice of programming language, and whatever on all the issues that the project has. They eventually acquire enough experience to be able to produce something that sort-of works around the 3rd attempt. But thanks to how good they are at communicating, are considered by management to be good engineers. While doing a working project at the 1st try, without using this week's new framework and so on isn't as valued.

baxtr 3y ago

I think an underrated way to deal with this phenomenon is proper self-marketing. Talk endlessly what you have done to prevent catastrophe. Describe the avoided catastrophes vividly so that people get a clear picture.

mcbishop 3y ago
Better yet, be in a work culture where people happily give credit to and praise others.
nhumrich 3y ago
Sometimes you can't quantify actual avoided things. For example you can't prove that a regulation stove actually prevented what could have been a kitchen fire.
thret 3y ago
Self-promotion is incredibly difficult for some people.
- marviel 3y ago
  fair, but it's better to point out the solution: "learn how to be better at self promotion" Do you have another solution to this issue?
  - dr_kiszonka 3y ago
    Find someone to champion your work. Also, if you aren't already, start praising others' work in the hopes that they will reciprocate.
    - elbear 3y ago
      The caveat to this is to make sure hope doesn't turn into expectation. Expectation can turn into sourness when the others don't reciprocate. Also, some people feel when you do something just because you expect something in exchange, and that tends to make them not reciprocate.

welder 3y ago

Quit your job and work for yourself.

cjbgkagh 3y ago

I've done that as an hourly contractor, I fixed their 6 month problem on my first day, I hoped they would then hire me for more hours on other stuff but they were like nope, that was all we needed. They did tell some other companies that I was good at this kind of stuff but nothing came of it. My first and last day in contracting for small companies.

damianh 3y ago
The trick is to do these sort of engagements as a fixed price contract. You could have probably done an assessment in a hour or two. Then you charge on what you estimate is the value to the company.
- cjbgkagh 3y ago
  I should have, but it would have been obvious that I pulled a fast one on them as the fix was really quite simple. Instead of building a Hadoop cluster I replace a sql sub query with a bitmask. It really only took an hour to figure it out but they let me charge the whole day.
  - cced 3y ago
    How much was it costing them? Also, can you describe the problem? It sounds interesting.
    - cjbgkagh 3y ago
      It was $200 an hour for a total of 8 hours. They had a team of 5 working for six months on it and they planed to spend another six months on it. The UI had options to check some categories and exclude others, this was mapped to sql with a nested query IN (…) and not in (…). I noticed that there were less than 64 categories and always will be so I figured pack the category membership into a 64bit ints and use bitwise operations. The UI query generation would map to use bitmasks instead. They didn’t even let me implement it, just agreed that it would work and took it from there. I think they were quite embarrassed by it. It ended up being 10K faster.

aswanson 3y ago

No one knows your true value but yourself. Move accordingly.

agumonkey 3y ago

Me neither. And I've had a similar issue with the first case. You do your work and help someone finish theirs, people still think you only did you job (even if people do credit you, you still have normal impact). The psychology of workplace is quite subtle and almost backward. There's a motto "squeaky wheel gets the grease" .. to the point I'm thinking of trying some games. Like designers who produce crappy options and one good to toy with higher ups thinking they decide. There are some ideas in that vein so you flip the relationship and benefit from it instead of bleeding.

PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago

That's not true, your value is clear just subtle. If your solutions tend to be more stable from the get-go, it will get noticed at most places. There are always going to be that odd company where that's not true, but in my experience, simply doing higher quality work gets appreciated.

wildrhythms 3y ago
Well it's not 'clear' when every promotional process I've encountered doesn't reward such forward-thinking preventative maintenance compared to someone who postures themselves as a hero going around putting out manufactured fires.
- PH95VuimJjqBqy 3y ago
  cynicism is easy.

eschneider 3y ago

It's mostly a question of finding organizations that recognize and value that sort of contribution. It also helps if you track who you work with and what you help out on every day, so when review time comes along you can list not only your 'regular job' wins, but all the wins you helped teammates get.

hinkley 3y ago

The problem with doing something right the first time is nobody appreciates how hard it was.

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madrox 3y ago

Think of it this way: when a principal engineer is hired from outside the company, what is the forecasted value of that engineer? How was that determined, since they have yet to do anything? If Andrej Karpathy joined your AI startup, people won't say this person has unclear value. It's because of the impact they've had previously and what other people have to say about that person. Value is your reputation.

ignoramous 3y ago

> Don't know how to deal Good leaders. Or, worse: Consultants. That is, it takes either an outsider or a self-critical leader to affect change? Those doing the planning are always optimistic [0] about their decisions, processes, evaluations, and progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning_fallacy [0] not always bad: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_hand_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiding_hand_principle

QuantumGood 3y ago

It's always worth making some effort at promoting your value; no one else is likely to do it for you.

a012 3y ago

My anecdata is to be vocal about your works, like having short knowledge sharing sessions to show it to your team/manager. Don’t be afraid of little things, your team would learn something from it.

rapfaria 3y ago
Agreed but selling your work is an art. Sometimes folks try and sell it so often that it makes me wonder if they are really getting anything done. Having a boss that loves to sell his team's work to his boss also works wonders.

lr4444lr 3y ago

I hate to ask the obvious question, but maybe your job title is wrong?

jstarfish 3y ago

Play to your leadership. Exceptions apply, but female bosses tend to appreciate averted crises more than male ones. If your boss is male, let shit fail. You'll get hero points for responding to incidents. A female boss will quickly suspect incompetence if things keep breaking (i.e. see how far half-assed DIY home repairs get you with your wife before she loses patience with you). Your hero points will come from mitigation. This paradox comes up a lot in security. IME in this particular field the gender stuff is less relevant since everyone is paranoid. But when we run stuff up to C-levels, it's only the female execs and lawyers that really stop to consider possible issues-- the men just dismiss everything until it happens.

Spooky23 3y ago

I think there’s a “this is life” aspect and a “this organization is immature aspect”. A mature organization respects the process that prevents getting stuck for 3 months. But… they may be more stable and less nimble. Boring orgs don’t like heroes.

lumost 3y ago

The problem may be in the relative value contribution. A senior eng that rights a project on 3 days which had been going on for 6 months is incredibly high value/he work. A Sr eng who spends 6 months coaching a junior engineer has much lower value/hour.

bruce511 3y ago

Presumably that's not -all- you do? Or did you sit around for 3 months going quietly mad waiting? Assuming you are doing other things make sure that is visible. Also why did your colleague wait 3 months to ask you for help? A couple days would be OK, a month would be crazy. You should poll them and not wait for an interrupt.

johnnyanmac 3y ago

Security/insurance paradox: when you do some jobs perfectly, it feels like you're doing nothing. Sadly, the only (ethical) way to counter such narrative is to spend a good amount of your time making reports showing how well everything is working and how it's not something you can just operate autonomously without disaster (to answer the inevitable "well the job is done, what are we paying you for?)

staunton 3y ago
How do you get people to read such reports?

puchatek 3y ago

An adjacent problem is how to know that you've really prevented issues/others from getting stuck with whatever you were working on. No system is perfect and engineering is also an art of knowing when to skip which corners. If nobody sees value in your preventive work then maybe there isn't any?

fendy3002 3y ago

Other problem on similar spectrum, when you have a good performance and your boss notice you, their expectations can increase and increase until you unable to deliver, then suddenly you're bad.

greesil 3y ago

Having a carefree life of no technical debt is not its own reward? Firefighting is stressful :)

SilkRoadie 3y ago

I went on holiday for 2 weeks. Came back to find the team had spent a week on a 5 minute task that had been clearly documented. Nothing had moved forward. Spoke to my manager that day and from that day forward it was clear what my value was. Eventually lead the team and helped the team develop processes and initiative so they could be productive in my absence. Up until that point I knew my value but I don’t think anyone else quite got it.

loceng 3y ago

At least you're likely not a person who works at a freelance agency where you purposefully do poor work or break things, so then you can bill more time "fixing" the problem - until the client gets the wiser at least, or there's another more oblivious client you can grift much more easily who doesn't know better? The above seems to be how the top billing agencies on Upwork function, with fewer staff you can grift more people because the hours being billed aren't honest, and so you can have more clients and reach the "top" earnings position faster and more easily; with the same practices existing at least on one of the two prior platforms before oDesk and Elance merged.

threatripper 3y ago

If they don't pay you to fix those problems then don't fix those problems until they start paying you for it. You'll have to deal with the psychological torture of watching things go horribly wrong. So it's up to you how to deal with it.

throwaway2037 3y ago

Don't help anyone too much until a manager asks you to help. If someone is really pressing help, tell them that you are busy, but they can ask the manager to tell me to help. This way, you always get maximum credit. Every single manager that I have worked for claimed they were "different" and did not suffer from it. Usually, I give them many chances to see my value. After I am overlooked too many times, I revert to this selfish mode explained previously. In all such cases, my recognition from the manager improves. Sigh.

Lutger 3y ago
I don't know about that, you might want to receive some help yourself right? In some cases it might be better to work at a place that values cooperation more than competition. You sound like you would thrive better at such a work culture. However, often leads just need something in order to know what you are doing, especially managers that don't really closely work together with their team. It can help to just mention it to your lead. Because it is easy to see what you done, but not how you have helped somebody. Just mention it in whatever recurrent meeting you have. And if helping out takes more time, I'd say it is only fair to have whoever is responsible for delivery involved in prioritization, because then it is at the detriment of whatever you are working on, which might be more important. Often, it takes less than 15-30 minutes to help somebody get unstuck. I wouldn't enjoy working at a place where people would refuse to help me with something like that, or I would be so pressed to achieve things that I can't spare 30 minutes out of my day to help someone out.

kymki 3y ago

The educational system i was put through was set up to teach that outcome scales more or less linearly with effort and time. The first lesson after graduation is that this is not so. Increased effort and time most likely primarily yields more effort and time being expected of you with lagging compensation. Value and opportunity are chaotic processes in effort and time. All we can do is to try to maintain the levels of workload such that we have clarity of mind to seize opportunities when they reveal themselves. Honest and balanced colleagues help there, but that is ultimately a missions for yourself only.

aquarkortwo 3y ago
Helpful partners and friends who try to find opportunities most definitely can help (and in unbalanced relationships, can do it all), like the market research team at a startup.

mirekrusin 3y ago

Time. Your value will emerge with time. Just keep calm and carry on. Good and bad times will do their usual sinusoidal dance but your slope will be pointing up if you zoom out. There will be unfair promotions outside of your team, reductions or freezes in yours (companies have tendency to throw people at problems = inflate dysfunctional parts; if you have well performing team - they won’t let you grow short term; just wait it out, they will eventually).

hef19898 3y ago

If the headline were actually true... Agree with your point, solving problems gets you points, avoiding them doesn't. My cynical view of the headline is, that a lot of people do get credit for solving problems that never really existed, simply either fabricating (intentionally or not) easy to solve problems or vastly overblowing problems they just happen to have a "solution" for. If ypu successfully fight a fire, you are a hero, if you prevent fires it is just normal and nothing special.

koliber 3y ago

It's possible to phrase the value proposition to align with what you want to deliver. You can phrase it as "I help teams deliver on time by making sure they don't get stuck." Or "I increase a team's velocity by preventing mistakes that stop work." It's how you sell yourself and then, how you tell the story of what happened. Being able to tell a compelling story is important.

Mordisquitos 3y ago
The issue is how do you provide the evidence for that. In other terms, how do you differentiate your effect from that of Homer Simpson's Bear Patrol and Lisa's tiger-repellant rock [0]? [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
- Lutger 3y ago
  It is really really hard to do that in a context where its not embedded in either work culture or appreciated by your lead. It is easy enough to 'measure', a good lead would value how you benefit the team and enhance your co-workers productivity and seek to understand this part of your contribution. He or she could just ask your peers, it is not science. If this does not apply to your situation at all, then leave because no amount of evidence will ever force your superiors to accept it, it will only antagonize them. You do need to make your case sometimes, but the level of proof should not be that high, you need some trust in order to function as an org even if it is exploited sometimes.

sparrowInHand 3y ago

Your value gets revealed in your absence. To leave and the company tanks- is a expression of the value shadow you throw.

teekert 3y ago

It’s dealt with by knowledgeable managers that recognize and award your skill according. If you don’t have such a manager, perhaps find them. Or become them.

figassis 3y ago

Your managers need to understand the work that you're doing. When I review someone's code and I see them fixing something potentially catastrophic but that never happened, I definitely remember that and congratulate them. When I see a team member ask a question that makes me or the team rethink implementation strategy. That is very valuable. When a code reviewer finds a potentially critical bug in my code, or just a nuanced bug, I remember and appreciate. Because I fully understand that those are potential p0 or p1 issues. And great engineers are consistently good at this type of passive, keeping the lights on work, but it does not reflect on their quantifiable work, so orgs do not include this in performance reviews. It is up to your manager to recognize this and advocate for you.

zeroonetwothree 3y ago
Even when they do recognize it it’s unlikely to be weighed the same as the engineer who heroically stays up all night fixing a critical issue. Especially with many organizations focused on data or metrics for performance reviews or promotions being able to say you fixed an outage that was costing $X million per hour comes across much better than a vague counterfactual notion that your high code quality prevented Y such outages in the first place.

darylteo 3y ago

I am dealing with similar. I can provide solutions 10x faster than anyone. Everyone looks up to me, and are dependent on me for solutions to everything. However it is clear that noone is improving and that the process IS me. What I've been trying to do is make sure that my scope and role is fully clarified, and any "extra" activity that I perform is documented and flagged. Anything that becomes a "common" activity implies a missing part of the process - be it a role that is missing, or a skillset that is lacking. Before you start thinking that it is pretentious or self serving, it's perhaps the opposite - you owe it to the process and the team/business/organisation to make them see what you're putting in, else they fail to find the gap. It's not paid off yet, but hopefully it will yield results within the next 6 months.

legendofbrando 3y ago
I do hope you’re recognized. One piece of advice, I found myself this person once - it’s the road to burn out city to be the critical path answer to everyone on the team’s challenges. You sound like someone who is very generous with your time and support. In my experience once people have found a critical path there is no point at which they “stop.” This isn’t because they’re trying to hurt you, they’ve just found the answer so to them it doesn’t seem wrong. It will take even more of your time, but you ought to consider practicing giving less answers and asking more questions of those who seek your help to try to help them unpack the issues themselves. It will feel more tiring at first, but you’ll gradually help the others learn and also create a small bit of friction that will encourage them to try their own solution or two before seeking you. Management asks are separate/ they can actually reward you with compensation and promotions for this extra work. But the team asking for help won’t stop when you get more comp unless you start teaching that you’re not the answer.
- darylteo 3y ago
  Really does help to hear this, thank you.

popcorncowboy 3y ago

Depending on your context, if you are at the top of the foodchain as described here, minus the recognition for it, one option is to simply add grist to the mill. Creative problems you can leave for the team to sweat and for you to come and slamdunk.

JohnClark1337 3y ago

[dead]

chaboud 3y ago

1. Donald Rumsfeld was right when he said “A’s hire A’s, B’s hire C’s”. 2. Environments where people can’t tell the difference between 1x and 1000x engineers lead to performative work and arsonist firefighting. 3. When folks in your organization can’t recognize (and reward) high impact, it’s probably time to get out, largely due to the first two points.

TeeMassive 3y ago

The lean mantra "Make work visible" is not only good at an organization level but also as professional feedback level. Although if used openly for promotions it will cease to be a good metric.

dimal 3y ago

Go into consulting.

indigochill 3y ago

> When I work there the whole time, and nobody ever gets stuck for 3 months, my value is unclear. Well, a problem that hasn't happened yet is a risk, right? So you can apply risk assessment math to it: Value = Estimated risk of the problem occurring * Cost if it happens

scooke 3y ago

I'm currently in an unrelated field, but with a similar tension of unclear value while things work. The way to deal with this has been to keep a tally of checks on important systems, whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, with links to undesired outcomes should the process that has been checked fail. This list of you checking the processes is one way to "prove" your value, at least for ppl who wouldn't necessarily understand naturally.