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I as a self interested actor as we all are see nothing wrong with: 1) Since around 2008 I’ve had 8 jobs after staying at my second job for nine years. Whether

I as a self interested actor as we all are see nothing wrong with: 1) Since around 2008 I’ve had 8 jobs after staying at my second job for nine years. Whether I was laid off or chose to get another job because of salary compression and inversion, being able to get a job quickly - and it’s never taken me more than a month even in 2023 and last year - was partially because at now 51, I have made damn sure I stay up to date with real world use of the “latest hotness”. 2) see #1 3) if you are a VC backed company, your shining light is not “make a good product”. It’s “the exit” and shortly afterwards a blog post about “our amazing journey” where they announce the product is going to be shut down. The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job.

xpe 1y ago
Yes, recognizing reality and the incentive structure is powerful. Then one can make smart tradeoffs. Most people want to stay in apparent alignment with their employer to advance. But sometimes perfect alignment isn’t optimal for what you want to do next. Some examples: Some might want to work on an interesting project with a new technology, even though it isn’t a recognized fit for your company. Some prefer to build strong and trusted relationships for referrals later. Some people will pursue aims that are to the detriment of their company. * It is wise to recognize the diversity of goals in people around you. * Getting great alignment is not easy. Not with people, not with highly capable intelligent agents trained with gradient descent that will probably operate outside their training distribution. Next time you think a powerful AI agent will do everything in your interests, ask yourself if your employee will do everything you want, just as you would want it.
brk 1y ago
This guy businesses. Big decisions are almost always made on factors that are more relationship based than technical based at the end of the day. Many highly technical people despise management, MBAs, and anything in that orbit. This is understandable, but leads to a lot of frustration. If you truly want to guide major decisions you are going to be more effective at the top of the stack than the bottom. Every tier has trade offs, and you are almost always having to sell some part of your soul to truly move up. Like it or not, most technical companies these days are managed to short terms goals and payouts. The C Suite, investors, etc are all just there for a payday. The actual product or anything else is just a detail in the goal of collecting commas. If you recognize this, you have a better chance of managing your own expectations at whatever level you are in the org. If you spend your time fighting for something that is not truly the goal of the company you will tend to have a bad time overall.
surgical_fire 1y ago
Regarding #1, when people ask what is the best skill I acquired during my career, I always answer that it was "learning how to do well in interviews". For a very long time it was the only thing I focused. Quite often the job itself is pretty easy, getting in is the hard part. In the past couple of years I let it slide a bit because keeping yourself sharp for interviews is sort of a pain in the ass, but I promised nyself that 2026 I'm back at it
- JustExAWS 1y ago
  It depends on what type of interviews you expect. My value proposition hasn’t been my ability to write code for over a decade. It was first being the first or second technical hire by a then new director/manager/CTO brought in to lead a new initiative as a lead/architect and then working in customer facing cloud consulting roles combined with hands on keyboard coding. With those roles, it’s all about soft skill behavioral interviews and system design. I can do those in my sleep. I just keep a career document of all of my major projects and describe them in STAR format so I can review them when needed.
  - surgical_fire 1y ago
    Absolutely, I was talking about very technical roles, typically as a software developer. "Individual Contributor" in contemporary corporate jargon. I was never interested in other roles.
    - JustExAWS 1y ago
      The problem with those roles are that they are easily commoditizable and were even before AI. It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews. I was very much and I am very much an IC. I chose a path to manage and deliver projects with about half and half hands on keyboard coding and the other half dealing with “the business” and not manage people. But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.
quickthrowman 1y ago
> The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job. I fully agree with this after attempting to ‘do the right thing’ and getting nowhere. I don’t have all of the information the decision makers have, so I may not have the full picture. Even if it’s a bad decision, it’s out of my hands. Now I do what Colin Powell advised: “disagree and commit”. You can’t win every battle, so you’ll have to accept certain decisions and move on, and accomplish your goals regardless.

xpe 1y ago

Yes, recognizing reality and the incentive structure is powerful. Then one can make smart tradeoffs. Most people want to stay in apparent alignment with their employer to advance. But sometimes perfect alignment isn’t optimal for what you want to do next. Some examples: Some might want to work on an interesting project with a new technology, even though it isn’t a recognized fit for your company. Some prefer to build strong and trusted relationships for referrals later. Some people will pursue aims that are to the detriment of their company. * It is wise to recognize the diversity of goals in people around you. * Getting great alignment is not easy. Not with people, not with highly capable intelligent agents trained with gradient descent that will probably operate outside their training distribution. Next time you think a powerful AI agent will do everything in your interests, ask yourself if your employee will do everything you want, just as you would want it.

brk 1y ago

This guy businesses. Big decisions are almost always made on factors that are more relationship based than technical based at the end of the day. Many highly technical people despise management, MBAs, and anything in that orbit. This is understandable, but leads to a lot of frustration. If you truly want to guide major decisions you are going to be more effective at the top of the stack than the bottom. Every tier has trade offs, and you are almost always having to sell some part of your soul to truly move up. Like it or not, most technical companies these days are managed to short terms goals and payouts. The C Suite, investors, etc are all just there for a payday. The actual product or anything else is just a detail in the goal of collecting commas. If you recognize this, you have a better chance of managing your own expectations at whatever level you are in the org. If you spend your time fighting for something that is not truly the goal of the company you will tend to have a bad time overall.

surgical_fire 1y ago

Regarding #1, when people ask what is the best skill I acquired during my career, I always answer that it was "learning how to do well in interviews". For a very long time it was the only thing I focused. Quite often the job itself is pretty easy, getting in is the hard part. In the past couple of years I let it slide a bit because keeping yourself sharp for interviews is sort of a pain in the ass, but I promised nyself that 2026 I'm back at it

JustExAWS 1y ago
It depends on what type of interviews you expect. My value proposition hasn’t been my ability to write code for over a decade. It was first being the first or second technical hire by a then new director/manager/CTO brought in to lead a new initiative as a lead/architect and then working in customer facing cloud consulting roles combined with hands on keyboard coding. With those roles, it’s all about soft skill behavioral interviews and system design. I can do those in my sleep. I just keep a career document of all of my major projects and describe them in STAR format so I can review them when needed.
- surgical_fire 1y ago
  Absolutely, I was talking about very technical roles, typically as a software developer. "Individual Contributor" in contemporary corporate jargon. I was never interested in other roles.
  - JustExAWS 1y ago
    The problem with those roles are that they are easily commoditizable and were even before AI. It’s also harder to stand out from the crowd if (the royal) you has as your only vector of competition is an ability to do coding interviews. I was very much and I am very much an IC. I chose a path to manage and deliver projects with about half and half hands on keyboard coding and the other half dealing with “the business” and not manage people. But if you look at the leveling guidelines of any major tech company, “codez real gud” only gets you to a mid level role.

quickthrowman 1y ago

> The goal of politics in the office is not to do “the right thing”. It’s to stay in alignment with the people who control your paycheck and to make sure you can keep exchanging money for labor when time comes to her another job. I fully agree with this after attempting to ‘do the right thing’ and getting nowhere. I don’t have all of the information the decision makers have, so I may not have the full picture. Even if it’s a bad decision, it’s out of my hands. Now I do what Colin Powell advised: “disagree and commit”. You can’t win every battle, so you’ll have to accept certain decisions and move on, and accomplish your goals regardless.