6 ms·

I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion a

I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Think about it like this. A customer is the entity that exchanges money for something they value; like a good or service. That's usually your manager. Or in the case of OP the promotion committee. (Many times it's both your manager and the promotion committee). They are the ones who directly control your money (raise, bonus, promotion, etc). With that perspective in mind it makes sense to manage your career as a business where you're doing things to increase the rate at which you deliver value to the entity which can trade money for that value. Many of the setbacks you faced are very common when trying to run your own business. The customer changes their mind, the market shifts the goal posts, you realize you're focusing on the wrong things. Like a business you have to constantly change your strategy and adapt to the customer; not the other way around. Why? Because the customer can very easily get their goods or services from someone else if you can't deliver what they want.

ljm 2y ago
What you are describing is contracting, self-employment, consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.
- manmal 2y ago
  Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I can’t say I disagree with GP. Maybe I‘ve overlooked something.
  - lazide 2y ago
    They probably prefer to believe they don’t have to do those things.
hinkley 2y ago
And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want. And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.
- WWLink 2y ago
  > And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
  - antupis 2y ago
    And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.
  - hinkley 2y ago
    MS offers bundle deals to managers who eat that up like a 1980’s TV wife bragging about how she “saved” the family $300 by buying $1000 of shit they didn’t need. It’s been their schtick practically from the beginning.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
heresie-dabord 2y ago
> the most important lesson of any career: The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process". In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process. Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society. From the Fine Article: "Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."
LightBug1 2y ago
Sounds like hell.
DeathArrow 2y ago
>I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.
- noduerme 2y ago
  Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases. Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite. So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise). See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
  - naveen99 2y ago
    Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease. Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.
  - esprehn 2y ago
    > Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases. While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track... The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics. It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet. We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.
- julianeon 2y ago
  Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.

ljm 2y ago

What you are describing is contracting, self-employment, consultancy, and those are orthogonal to having a career.

manmal 2y ago
Why are you adding this distinction? Having done both, I can’t say I disagree with GP. Maybe I‘ve overlooked something.
- lazide 2y ago
  They probably prefer to believe they don’t have to do those things.

hinkley 2y ago

And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. But if you’re working for a boss, they can get in the way. It’s not enough that you do what the customer wants, you have to do it my way, even if that prevents the customer from getting what they want. And if the “customer” is buying the item for someone else, that indirection can result in failure as well. Which often happens when you make custom software for businesses. Their boss wants what he wants, and that’s not what his employees want.

WWLink 2y ago
> And the user may also not be the customer. Which is why UX and DevEx are so much more difficult. If you’re a person making a piece on commission, what the buyer wants and needs can be different and you can get to the end and they are still unhappy. This is exactly we end up with MS Products like Teams and Windows Phone 7/8 lol. A lot of MS stuff is built to sell to the companies not the employees.
- antupis 2y ago
  And it is working generally very well if you compare GCP and Azure. DX is much better at GCP but Azure does stuff that companies care much better and is 2x bigger.
- hinkley 2y ago
  MS offers bundle deals to managers who eat that up like a 1980’s TV wife bragging about how she “saved” the family $300 by buying $1000 of shit they didn’t need. It’s been their schtick practically from the beginning.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

heresie-dabord 2y ago

> the most important lesson of any career: The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Such is a "career" in a large hierarchy, where actual acquaintance with people hardly exists and is replaced by "process". In short, your real customers are not even people anymore, they are a process. Having enthusiasm for pursuing great ideas that help people is the sweet spot in both career and society. From the Fine Article: "Of course my fate should be in the hands of a mysterious committee who’s never met me. They wouldn’t be tainted by any sort of favoritism or politics. They’d see past all that and recognize me for my high-quality code and shrewd engineering decisions."

LightBug1 2y ago

Sounds like hell.

DeathArrow 2y ago

>I think you learned the most important lesson of any career: the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers. Yes and maximizing the value of your business means optimizing for promotion. Students should be teached these things in universities so they don't waste years from their lives after they graduate.

noduerme 2y ago
Optimizing for promotion is a terrible solution to life's problems. Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases. Whether the a corporate hierarchy is your "customer" or you deal with actual end-consumers, the goal is to minimize your workload while maximizing your paycheck, and a promotion in a corporate setting simply does not do that anywhere short of the C-suite. So what should one optimize for, if not promotion? Being the indispensable guru in your domain. People get promoted and people get laid off. No one has as much power as the person you cannot, must not, ever fire. In such a situation, the optimal strategy is to terrify one's superiors who don't understand the domain, and refuse promotion (but do accept a raise). See that webmonkey in the corner next to the rain pipe, making double what the manager makes? If they fired him the whole company would be screwed because he's the only one who has a complete picture of XYZ client's network infrastructure.
- naveen99 2y ago
  Ideally promotions are for people who can handle increased responsibility with ease. Think of lifting more weight every week when you begin a strength training program. You get promoted until you plateau.
- esprehn 2y ago
  > Promotions often, if not always, come with much larger workloads for only marginal pay increases. While this might be true in other industries, in big tech companies like TFA is talking about SWE promotions come with rather large increases in pay. https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track=Software%20Engineer https://www.levels.fyi/?compare=Amazon,Facebook,Google&track... The author was trying to go from L4 to L5. Promotions are also backwards facing, which means at the point you get promoted you're already doing the larger workload.

cmrdporcupine 2y ago

> the customer is not your customer. The person/people who control your raise, bonus, and promotion are your real customers This is definitely the case in many/most companies, but it's also a sign of a dysfunctional and declining internal company culture, and a bad pattern that will lead to decline in quality of product and deteriorating internal team dynamics. It's better to seek out employers where this inevitable trend is explicitly countered, or hasn't developed yet. We all feel better when we're producing good quality and get recognition for it.

julianeon 2y ago
Above a certain company size however I think what he’s describing is not avoidable. In a less than 0.5k person company you’ve very close to the company. In a > 10k person company there’s no way: there’s a lot of layers to the company and often can’t “touch” the customer as an employee. The nature of the job is mediating how the layers interact: you can’t reduce that complexity out of it.