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> People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. This key assumption behind the whole article is actually a terrible men

> People generally don't do what they're told, but what they expect to be rewarded for. This key assumption behind the whole article is actually a terrible mentality to take for true and self-evident, as the author has -- at least within the scope of one's relationship with a manager. The people that most of us have been impressed by in our careers, and in our life, are often very hard to characterize this way. They aren't going around fitting themselves to the next nearest supervisor's desires (stated or unstated). Instead, they've generally developed a strong and characteristic signature to the way they approach their work and they've learned how to quickly impress that personal signature onto the people around them so that those people know what to expect. Here and there, that mean leaving some workplace for being a poor fit to its needs and capabilities, but the long term arc is towards settling into some role as a respected expert who advises and informs the management team that leverages them. If you think everybody ("generally") will just strive do what their immediate boss wants, and so don't challenge yourself to not do that, you just trap yourself into thrashing around and being frustrated by trying to read people's minds, parse direction vs incentives, impress people who can't even pin down what you're about (because you yourself don't know), etc. It's a dead end. Don't buy into it. A defense of the initial assumption might be made by tossing the bit about the proximate manager who you're either obeying or anticipating and widening the scope to say that we're all pursuing reward over plain obedience. And that's a good defense, but only because the "reward" is something abstract and personal like fulfillment of our own career/lifestyle trajectory or our own vision of the craft.

lmz 2y ago
Would you really associate "generally" with "The people that most of us have been impressed by"? I would think that the impressive people are impressive precisely because they stand out from the general masses.
Joker_vD 2y ago
You probably didn't read the rest of the article because the author actually mentions the kind of people you're talking about. See Corollary 1.
- swatcoder 2y ago
  Somebody who knows what they're good at and makes it clear to the people who work with them is not an "insane" or even an exceptional person. They're just a self-assured and competent trades-person that's easy to work with and anticipate value from. When I wrote about "who we're impressed" by, that's a broad category and it should includes most of us -- either now or when we finally get our shit together and stop trying to do short-term people-pleasing and mind-reading. Most of us are neither professional sycophants or professional psychics and the only way to stay sane through a 40 year career as professional engineer or other kind of technical IC is to do the good work that you can do well, make sure people know what that is, and hope that it's lined up with where the industry needs during that time.
  - p1esk 2y ago
    They're just a self-assured and competent trades-person that's easy to work with and anticipate value from. Such people are rare. I’m speaking from experience working at multiple startups. It’s even worse at big companies.
andrewflnr 2y ago
> The people that most of us have been impressed by in our careers... Those people impress you because they're rare. But the author still took the time to explicitly talk about almost the same set of people you are, who buck the trend and sometimes manage to make real changes. Anyway, it becomes clear by the end that he's giving advice to managers, less so to the managed, so it makes little sense to focus on what he might wish individual contributors did. From a management perspective, that's not actionable. You don't make plans based on rare impressive people, you make plans based on the common case. I mean, do you disagree that a manager should plan on their reports acting on their real incentives rather than what the manager says they want?
- swatcoder 2y ago
  They're not, which I know because I wrote that and I know my own experience and I know what I meant. Hopefully, you see your self -- or your future self -- as a person you would be impressed by. These people are all over the place, looking competent and confident, being appreciated, referred, and brought onto projects. They are legion, and it's not hard to be one. But thinking in the way reinforced by this article and some of the replies to my comment traps your career and your mental health in a much less comfortable and sustainable place.
  - noirbot 2y ago
    I feel that I have an interesting relationship to this mentality. Many of the most impressive people I've known and looked up to in my career have been far from rewarded for the competence and confidence they brought to my workplaces. Indeed, I've seen a few of them fired, and some of them sidelined for years despite being appreciated and referred. I'm even cautious about referring them because, while impressive, they were brash and bold in ways that put them quickly at odds with their organizations. We don't always, or even mostly, or often ever, work at an organization that wants to be impressed by their engineers, no matter how much they say they do. The sorts of places that actually do foster that are rare and all but impossible to get hired at. I don't have the luxury of working at somewhere where I'm impressed by my coworkers and look up to them. My career and mental health isn't comfortable or sustainable. I'd love to fix this, but in the meantime, I often literally don't get to pick my manager and how they interact with me or value my team's work and priorities. I can tell you that the engineers who most impressed me and were appreciated by me were often not by management, and not brought onto projects. It may not be hard to be one, but it's often hard to keep being one.
roenxi 2y ago
The issue with that is, distilled, the strategy comes across as "be exceptional". The most impressive people are rarely using strategies that would work for an average member of the crowd. The ones that are using standard strategies are generally so extraordinary in motivation and talent that they're going to achieve exceptional success through raw out-competition of rivals. Technically I can imagine a world where every member of a software team sets themselves up as an adviser and productive support for the management team through sheer force of personality and mastery of soft skills. But practically it seems a bit utopian. Firstly, there are cases where the manager is just more canny than the report and a please-the-boss strategy would be best for everyone. Then there are the cases where the manager is low-empathy or not great at taking advice once they've made a mistake which covers 80% of the managers I know (most of whom are nonetheless pretty good and capable managers). Then the cases where the manager is incompetent technically and will fall for persuasive gibberish from someone who spends more time talking than coding. If management is ideal and the employees inspired then everyone pushing for what they think best is great. But the moment the cracks of reality intrude I'd bet on yosefk's cynicism. It just asks too much of an employee that they have to be technically competent enough to chart their own path, business savvy enough to correctly place themselves for the needs of the organisation and be capable enough at soft skills to sell these truths to people with more power than them. The best of us might. Most are going to do what they get rewarded for instead.
whiterknight 2y ago
Just read about 6 months of your comments. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.
- tehnub 2y ago
  I was just considering doing that too, lol. I saw this post on the burnout thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461745 and was impressed, and started reading this one and was impressed, and realized it was the same poster.
makeitdouble 2y ago
> > what they expect to be rewarded for. > they've learned how to quickly impress that personal signature onto the people around them so that those people know what to expect. I think you point still fits in the article's premise: the people that impress you are able to get rewarded for what they do, whether the manager initially intended to do so. On the other hand, if they constantly don't get rewarded they'll eventually leave for greener pastures, so it stays a crucial part.
sweeter 2y ago
the context of the article is that as a manager, you can say that you value one thing all day long and do lip service to this hyper-idealistic set of goals... but that people are going to intuitively sense what is actually important to that person by what they incentivize and hold important through actions. an exaggerated example would be a manager saying that they value communication and talking through problems, they can proselytize about the values they think a team should have all day and night. But when everyone under that person sees that person consistently yelling or going off on people when they try to communicate with them about a problem... we are probably just going to shut that person out or hide things from them because its not worth the stress of trying to communicate with that person. this isn't about people striving to please their boss, its about perverse incentive structures and your superiors words and actions matching.
matheusmoreira 2y ago
There's plenty of "impressive" people who make a lot less money than extremely mundane people. And I mean a lot less money. Like they make orders of magnitude less cash. We literally live in the YouTuber age where you can become a multimillionaire by making the stupidest, most useless videos imaginable. You can provide negative value to society and be more financially successful than the sort of "impressive" person you describe. It's enough to seriously warp one's sense of right and wrong but it is what it is and there's nothing we can do about it. So can we really fault people for doing the things which reward them? Assuming "impressiveness" leads to success is the real dead end. I think these people get to be "impressive" because they're actually rich enough to not care what managers want. You said it yourself: "leaving some workplace for being a poor fit to its needs and capabilities". If you can afford to do this, then of course you can be as unique as you want with no consequences. If the managers start raining on your parade, you just quit.
brailsafe 2y ago
I... would have in my early twenties agreed with you, but now I see the that if you're employed, you should do the most visible and most evidently rewarded for work, anything else is just extra if you've got time for it, but I'd argue you should give yourself that time back if possible. Or you can just do anything you can to make yourself valuable to keep around in some genuine way, but you need to have a keen sense of what's actually valuable. Put another way, regular forms of success in NA business culture, at least from my PoV, comes from "reading the room", and the unspoken implications that your higher ups who actually do have control over your ability to stay employed, are saying even if they're not saying it. If you spend more time on something because you feel it's virtuous or stylistic to do so, but your manager wanted just the most basic bullshit for some presentation, you've failed, and you've wasted time and money, and I think this is more common than not. Nobody ever got fired for picking Bootstrap or w/e the saying is. In rare circumstances you chance your way into doing something so efficiently or well, within budget in a way that specifically fulfills all the wishes of everyone who has tangible control over your income, and also in a way that was worth the time and money, so much so that you get praise and a raise eventually. You can't try and do this all the time thought, you'll burnout or maybe destroy trust or read the room wrong about your requirement. If there's not a very clear path to being well-rewarded, then focus on what you're getting paid for. The alternative is specialty contracting or running your own business, where you can choose your customers based on the fact that they want your unique expertise, if you're lucky. If you succeed at either, great, but don't necessarily set that bar for yourself.
- hunterrrrrr 2y ago
  > but don't necessarily set that bar for yourself. When someone is grotesquely underpaid the bar is pretty low. Take median salary for example. In some places merely buying a home and having it appreciate over the course of one singular year is enough to replace an entire median salary (in that same place) > if you’re lucky Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
  - 2y ago
ulnarkressty 2y ago
What's lost on HN is that not all people are 5-star engineers with unlimited growth potential. Most are in the middle of the curve, working at companies that can't afford to pay them that well, stuck there because home/family/etc. So it's not a surprise when they try to game the system instead of spending time and effort on improving themselves.
psychoslave 2y ago
Why do you want to impress other people, including future self (which unfortunately existence probability tend toward zero, I’m afraid)? What is that impress people generally, and what is it that impress you specifically? That might be at odd. Being impressive in itself is nothing desirable, really. Think about all the sociopaths whose names are engraved in history books as they were the greatest butchers of their time. On my side, I prefer people that are showing ability to give love and care with empathy first, and then see how to make any technical challenge fit in that frame.

lmz 2y ago

Would you really associate "generally" with "The people that most of us have been impressed by"? I would think that the impressive people are impressive precisely because they stand out from the general masses.

Joker_vD 2y ago

You probably didn't read the rest of the article because the author actually mentions the kind of people you're talking about. See Corollary 1.

swatcoder 2y ago
Somebody who knows what they're good at and makes it clear to the people who work with them is not an "insane" or even an exceptional person. They're just a self-assured and competent trades-person that's easy to work with and anticipate value from. When I wrote about "who we're impressed" by, that's a broad category and it should includes most of us -- either now or when we finally get our shit together and stop trying to do short-term people-pleasing and mind-reading. Most of us are neither professional sycophants or professional psychics and the only way to stay sane through a 40 year career as professional engineer or other kind of technical IC is to do the good work that you can do well, make sure people know what that is, and hope that it's lined up with where the industry needs during that time.
- p1esk 2y ago
  They're just a self-assured and competent trades-person that's easy to work with and anticipate value from. Such people are rare. I’m speaking from experience working at multiple startups. It’s even worse at big companies.

andrewflnr 2y ago

> The people that most of us have been impressed by in our careers... Those people impress you because they're rare. But the author still took the time to explicitly talk about almost the same set of people you are, who buck the trend and sometimes manage to make real changes. Anyway, it becomes clear by the end that he's giving advice to managers, less so to the managed, so it makes little sense to focus on what he might wish individual contributors did. From a management perspective, that's not actionable. You don't make plans based on rare impressive people, you make plans based on the common case. I mean, do you disagree that a manager should plan on their reports acting on their real incentives rather than what the manager says they want?

swatcoder 2y ago
They're not, which I know because I wrote that and I know my own experience and I know what I meant. Hopefully, you see your self -- or your future self -- as a person you would be impressed by. These people are all over the place, looking competent and confident, being appreciated, referred, and brought onto projects. They are legion, and it's not hard to be one. But thinking in the way reinforced by this article and some of the replies to my comment traps your career and your mental health in a much less comfortable and sustainable place.
- noirbot 2y ago
  I feel that I have an interesting relationship to this mentality. Many of the most impressive people I've known and looked up to in my career have been far from rewarded for the competence and confidence they brought to my workplaces. Indeed, I've seen a few of them fired, and some of them sidelined for years despite being appreciated and referred. I'm even cautious about referring them because, while impressive, they were brash and bold in ways that put them quickly at odds with their organizations. We don't always, or even mostly, or often ever, work at an organization that wants to be impressed by their engineers, no matter how much they say they do. The sorts of places that actually do foster that are rare and all but impossible to get hired at. I don't have the luxury of working at somewhere where I'm impressed by my coworkers and look up to them. My career and mental health isn't comfortable or sustainable. I'd love to fix this, but in the meantime, I often literally don't get to pick my manager and how they interact with me or value my team's work and priorities. I can tell you that the engineers who most impressed me and were appreciated by me were often not by management, and not brought onto projects. It may not be hard to be one, but it's often hard to keep being one.

roenxi 2y ago

The issue with that is, distilled, the strategy comes across as "be exceptional". The most impressive people are rarely using strategies that would work for an average member of the crowd. The ones that are using standard strategies are generally so extraordinary in motivation and talent that they're going to achieve exceptional success through raw out-competition of rivals. Technically I can imagine a world where every member of a software team sets themselves up as an adviser and productive support for the management team through sheer force of personality and mastery of soft skills. But practically it seems a bit utopian. Firstly, there are cases where the manager is just more canny than the report and a please-the-boss strategy would be best for everyone. Then there are the cases where the manager is low-empathy or not great at taking advice once they've made a mistake which covers 80% of the managers I know (most of whom are nonetheless pretty good and capable managers). Then the cases where the manager is incompetent technically and will fall for persuasive gibberish from someone who spends more time talking than coding. If management is ideal and the employees inspired then everyone pushing for what they think best is great. But the moment the cracks of reality intrude I'd bet on yosefk's cynicism. It just asks too much of an employee that they have to be technically competent enough to chart their own path, business savvy enough to correctly place themselves for the needs of the organisation and be capable enough at soft skills to sell these truths to people with more power than them. The best of us might. Most are going to do what they get rewarded for instead.

whiterknight 2y ago

Just read about 6 months of your comments. Thanks for sharing your thoughts here.

tehnub 2y ago
I was just considering doing that too, lol. I saw this post on the burnout thread earlier https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461745 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41461745 and was impressed, and started reading this one and was impressed, and realized it was the same poster.

makeitdouble 2y ago

> > what they expect to be rewarded for. > they've learned how to quickly impress that personal signature onto the people around them so that those people know what to expect. I think you point still fits in the article's premise: the people that impress you are able to get rewarded for what they do, whether the manager initially intended to do so. On the other hand, if they constantly don't get rewarded they'll eventually leave for greener pastures, so it stays a crucial part.

sweeter 2y ago

the context of the article is that as a manager, you can say that you value one thing all day long and do lip service to this hyper-idealistic set of goals... but that people are going to intuitively sense what is actually important to that person by what they incentivize and hold important through actions. an exaggerated example would be a manager saying that they value communication and talking through problems, they can proselytize about the values they think a team should have all day and night. But when everyone under that person sees that person consistently yelling or going off on people when they try to communicate with them about a problem... we are probably just going to shut that person out or hide things from them because its not worth the stress of trying to communicate with that person. this isn't about people striving to please their boss, its about perverse incentive structures and your superiors words and actions matching.

matheusmoreira 2y ago

There's plenty of "impressive" people who make a lot less money than extremely mundane people. And I mean a lot less money. Like they make orders of magnitude less cash. We literally live in the YouTuber age where you can become a multimillionaire by making the stupidest, most useless videos imaginable. You can provide negative value to society and be more financially successful than the sort of "impressive" person you describe. It's enough to seriously warp one's sense of right and wrong but it is what it is and there's nothing we can do about it. So can we really fault people for doing the things which reward them? Assuming "impressiveness" leads to success is the real dead end. I think these people get to be "impressive" because they're actually rich enough to not care what managers want. You said it yourself: "leaving some workplace for being a poor fit to its needs and capabilities". If you can afford to do this, then of course you can be as unique as you want with no consequences. If the managers start raining on your parade, you just quit.

brailsafe 2y ago

I... would have in my early twenties agreed with you, but now I see the that if you're employed, you should do the most visible and most evidently rewarded for work, anything else is just extra if you've got time for it, but I'd argue you should give yourself that time back if possible. Or you can just do anything you can to make yourself valuable to keep around in some genuine way, but you need to have a keen sense of what's actually valuable. Put another way, regular forms of success in NA business culture, at least from my PoV, comes from "reading the room", and the unspoken implications that your higher ups who actually do have control over your ability to stay employed, are saying even if they're not saying it. If you spend more time on something because you feel it's virtuous or stylistic to do so, but your manager wanted just the most basic bullshit for some presentation, you've failed, and you've wasted time and money, and I think this is more common than not. Nobody ever got fired for picking Bootstrap or w/e the saying is. In rare circumstances you chance your way into doing something so efficiently or well, within budget in a way that specifically fulfills all the wishes of everyone who has tangible control over your income, and also in a way that was worth the time and money, so much so that you get praise and a raise eventually. You can't try and do this all the time thought, you'll burnout or maybe destroy trust or read the room wrong about your requirement. If there's not a very clear path to being well-rewarded, then focus on what you're getting paid for. The alternative is specialty contracting or running your own business, where you can choose your customers based on the fact that they want your unique expertise, if you're lucky. If you succeed at either, great, but don't necessarily set that bar for yourself.

hunterrrrrr 2y ago
> but don't necessarily set that bar for yourself. When someone is grotesquely underpaid the bar is pretty low. Take median salary for example. In some places merely buying a home and having it appreciate over the course of one singular year is enough to replace an entire median salary (in that same place) > if you’re lucky Can you help me understand how you derived being lucky from this equation? Kind of feels like we were maybe eagerly trying to arrive to a false “either this or that” outcome. Can you help me fix my understanding of your argument?
- 2y ago

ulnarkressty 2y ago

What's lost on HN is that not all people are 5-star engineers with unlimited growth potential. Most are in the middle of the curve, working at companies that can't afford to pay them that well, stuck there because home/family/etc. So it's not a surprise when they try to game the system instead of spending time and effort on improving themselves.

psychoslave 2y ago

Why do you want to impress other people, including future self (which unfortunately existence probability tend toward zero, I’m afraid)? What is that impress people generally, and what is it that impress you specifically? That might be at odd. Being impressive in itself is nothing desirable, really. Think about all the sociopaths whose names are engraved in history books as they were the greatest butchers of their time. On my side, I prefer people that are showing ability to give love and care with empathy first, and then see how to make any technical challenge fit in that frame.