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It seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager

It seems like this post can be summarized as follows: 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. 2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future, and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. I'd say it's good advice. The only thing I would add is that managers and leadership are sometimes happy to be given something different than what they asked for, so long as it's still what they wanted at a higher level. This is risky, but success can be a fast track to respect and autonomy.

Trasmatta 1y ago
I would rather not live my life with the sole purpose of people pleasing managers
- okdood64 1y ago
  What? This is what you are paid to do in your work life. This isn’t a thread about your whole life.
- smallnix 1y ago
  In case you can share an alternate strategy to make a career in a large tech company, please do, would be interested.
  - Trasmatta 1y ago
    That's the crux. I don't want a career in a large tech company.
    - the_af 1y ago
      Is working in a small tech company any different?
      - Trasmatta 1y ago
        Not really, I'd love to get out of tech entirely.
      - rjh29 1y ago
        Massively different. You generally have more autonomy, fewer managers, more responsibility and wear more hats. In my experience no corporate fake people pleasing or PR language or HR nonsense. Just regular people talking normally trying to get stuff done.
      - jcheng 1y ago
        It's SO different. It doesn't guarantee that life is good, but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. If you're objectively awesome, the chances of you being sidelined for political reasons is pretty low when there are like 10 people in the whole company. It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not. Conversely, if you're mediocre, there's nowhere to hide. Or maybe instead of saying there aren't politics at small companies, it's more accurate to say that there are politics, but they're simple--everyone strives to make the (hopefully benevolent) dictator, I mean founder, happy. If your founder is awesome, life is good. If your founder is not awesome, well, everyone is going to have a bad time anyway.
        Aurornis 1y ago
        > but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. I thoroughly believed this after working at a small company with little politics in one of my first jobs. But then a couple of the later small companies/startups I worked for had politics to such an insane degree that I no longer believe small companies are better or worse in general. They just have a larger variance. The larger the company, the more the workforce trends toward the mean. When you hire 10,000 people you can't exclusively build a company of low-politics people. With a 10-person company you technically can build that company of mostyl 1-in-100 employees who work well together. However, you could also stumble into a company where you're working with 10 people who have worked together previously and have no intention of bringing you into their inner circle. The politics at this latter type of company is truly next level hell because there's nowhere to go, unlike at a big company or FAANG where you can transfer teams or rely on your resume to get you into the application process at another company easily. > It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not. In my experience at highly political small companies, this doesn't matter. The people running the political show want the upper echelon of the company to be composed of their close friends and allies. They want the people who produce to be stuck doing the grunt work.
    - mystifyingpoi 1y ago
      > I don't want a career in a large tech company I would swear by this when I started working in IT, but 3y later I changed job and took a gig at a big corporation. It was eye opening and jaw dropping. Everything was lightyears ahead in terms of tech, management, money, investments in people, and much more compared to the small company. It geniuinely made me mad for not doing this sooner.
      - crystal_revenge 1y ago
        Strange, I've had the opposite experience: I've mostly worked with small startups and every few job changes will try a go at a big tech company. I'm always shocked at the gap in talent between small startups and large tech companies. Far and away all of the best and most talented coworkers I've had have been at small startups. Of course there's a lot of variance among small companies (much moreso than large ones). But the one thing that all small companies have is people who can actually get shit done not matter what it requires. The amount of "not my lane" nonsense that occupies corporate life is both exhausting and boring. I understand why this exists for practical reasons, but it's no fun.
  - bdangubic 1y ago
    you should do everything possible to make a career in a small company. after three decades as SWE it is my #1 (there is not even remotely close #2) advise for everyone in the early stages of their career
    - andrew_lettuce 1y ago
      The politics in small companies are far more extreme in my experience.
    - scarface_74 1y ago
      I am 51. I love small companies. My second best experience was working as the second technical hire by a then new to the company CTO who was hired to bring technical leadership into the company. The two non technical brothers who were founders outsourced the development to a consulting company until they found product market fit. But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS. Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services). It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant. Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table. At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more. I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money. Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.
  - exodust 1y ago
    The alternate strategy is loyalty to "the business" rather than any particular person. When you're invested in the success of the business above all else, and you make that known, you'll carve out a position where you're valued. Not because you went on a "carving out your importance" mission, but because your energy goes into your work, and the details and care for the long term business objectives. Also... you can then enjoy yourself more, which opens creativity which opens innovation. Sometimes this might mean disagreeing with managers or working on stuff nobody really knows you're working on right now. > "So if you want to get something technical done in a tech company, you ought to wait for the appropriate wave" No. That doesn't work. You have to start building it. Don't wait.
    - YZF 1y ago
      I agree with this. That's been my take throughput my pretty long career and was a recipe for success. You still need to: 1. Be good at what you do. 2. Be good at politics/communication when that's needed. 3. Be in an organization that has good people and also cares. There are organizations where there's just a complete disconnect from the business for various reasons. Dysfunctional.
    - rafaelero 1y ago
      This is a good strategy, imo. I was following it for almost a year and I was having a blast working in a startup. Then a new manager came along and started to dictate how things should be done without much input from the technical team. I kept fighting for what I thought was good for the product instead of aligning with him. In the end it was just too stressful (the manager was not only an idiot but also rude). I resigned, but I wouldn't have done any other way. I simply can't be made to do dumb things from uncurious people.
      - exodust 1y ago
        It's a shame when resigning is the only way out. Before reaching that point, the usual strategies should be attempted: Picking your battles; Negotiate rather than fight; Be better at analytics and research than anyone else. So you have the data to measure or predict success about a particular feature or direction. Armed with your data, you must carefully communicate findings without shaming others. It's a fine line between fostering a positive work environment in the face of misguided decisions, and being condescending or derisive towards other team members. There is no silver bullet, but a touch of self-deprecating humour never hurt. If you advice isn't taken, you'll have a non-snarky receipt. Any email written with an irritated tone, will look twice as bad months later.
  - georgeburdell 1y ago
    I don’t know if it’s different, but I always carve out about a day a week to work on “skunkworks” projects that will benefit my team but that nobody has asked for yet. Then, when it does get asked for, I have a rough solution ready to go.
    - smallnix 1y ago
      I think this ties very well into the advise of the article and is not orthogonal / different.
- tamimio 1y ago
  “You lack soft skills and initiative; unfortunately, you will not be promoted while having more responsibilities” - the manager who wants to be pleased. One time a manager hinted to me to be a snitch on my coworkers just so he could see I have “leader” attributes to get promoted later. Stay away from corps..
- chausen 1y ago
  It doesn’t have to be your some purpose; it could be within your normal working hours. It’s basically just choosing a goal to be intentional with at work.
- marcinzm 1y ago
  No matter what founders and managers say the reality is that 95% of tech jobs are meaningless outside the capitalistic flywheel. You're not making the world a better place. You're moving some bits around and extracting a profit from it. Pleasing a manager or pleasing the capitalistic flywheel doesn't seem much different to me.
- 010101010101 1y ago
  This makes for a pithy sound bite, but that’s pretty much only possible if you’re independently wealthy to the point of being in the “fuck you money” category of wealth. There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. Even if you’re a solo contractor you’re going to spend your time pleasing clients - sure, you can shed bad ones more easily than you can a bad manager, but you’re still beholden to someone who controls the purse. If you found a start up you’re pleasing your investors. If you’re a CEO of a large company you’re pleasing your board. Work is just the act of pleasing other people in specific ways based on your skillset.
  - snozolli 1y ago
    There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. IMO, the people who need to be pleased are the customers, and, IME, management's expectations very often run contrary to those of the customers. Turns out that anagement really doesn't like negative feedback from engineers which turns out to be echoed by users. I'd rather see career advice on how to prevent management from tanking the company without causing them to resent the engineer(s).
codazoda 1y ago
I read number 2 more as being ready with your own agenda items. For example, if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself. If you have something prepared and then there’s a site speed, SEO, or series of bug complaints you might be able to pitch your minimal ideas as part of that solution. I like the concept but I don’t know how well it would work in practice or how I would document my preparations for some point in the future. I do often wonder if I should run my work a bit like I run my blog though, generating documents about why and how. Maybe keeping them in wait for that opportunity. That could be a lot of extra work that never sees the light, but we probably do a lot of that anyway?
- bradlys 1y ago
  To flesh out things to where you could actually make a reasonable pitch with things like realistic time estimates and documents that would be useful to read then you'd have to have already done it, it'd be trivial, or you apparently have plenty of spare time to do serious spikes in your day to day. You'd also have to have the spare time to update these project ideas as the months pass, the product and codebase changes, etc. I'm often convinced people extrapolate their insane luck with teams+companies and assume every other company/team can replicate their results. I have a hard time finding people in high level positions who give the slightest of fucks about engineering focused tasks but I am someone who works on product teams. The target goal is always about making money - not saving money or improving velocity.
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- varispeed 1y ago
  > if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself. Why would you want to do that? You will not get the cream for such work. From experience, you'll never get recognition for these things, you will never get paid more and most certainly they may dump more work at you. Taking initiative and improving something never pays off to you. Unless you are the type of person that looks out of the window at the company car park and sees board member in a branch new Lambo and then say to yourself proudly "I did that".
akudha 1y ago
Or better options - just do the job you were hired for and go home or find that rare job (if possible) where engineering has a bigger role than politics. It is not pleasant to play a guessing game trying to please some manager, just because they’re your boss. Life is too short for stupid games
- andrew_lettuce 1y ago
  If you think corporate politics is just a stupid game you'll never be happy with what you accomplish and lucky to keep your job. Awareness and understanding, being able to tie effort to outcomes, positioning and sales; these are not guessing games.
- marcinzm 1y ago
  > engineering has a bigger role than politics I've never seen two people fight to the death over something meaningless as much as some engineers do. Politics is the end product of multiple people working together with different views. Engineering doesn't save you from it. Engineers who think it does tend to cause more political turmoil in teams than anyone else.
andrew_lettuce 1y ago
I'll add that all this goes up the food chain and is good advice for engineering managers too. As a director reporting to the CTO I tried to do this as well.
marcinzm 1y ago
I'd add: Don't do things those with more political power than you manager don't want done unless someone with even more power publicly tells you to. That doesn't mean you do what they want done but simply that you avoid pissing them off. Enemies are rarely worth making and the majority of managers will throw you under the bus to save their own skin in that situation.
Aurornis 1y ago
> 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. This point seems obvious, but it's one topics I've had to coach many early career people on over and over again. Many of the people who were having difficulties or heading toward PIP could be turned around by implementing a simple loop where they: 1. Ask their manager for the top priority, explicitly. Re-confirm the top priority every time you encounter a question about what to work on or new information that might change the situation. 2. Write it down. Put it somewhere visible. Check it every morning. Remind yourself about the top priority. 3. Do the top priority until it's done. Confirm that your manager agrees that it's done when you think it's done. It sounds simple to those of us who internalized these loops early in our careers, but some people don't see it so clearly until it's laid out for them. They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting.
- gmfawcett 1y ago
  Very well expressed. That's great early-career guidance, but also a good refresher for many senior staff.
  - Aurornis 1y ago
    The simpler version is "Actually deliver on what you're asked to do". It sounds so simple that people get offended when you say that. Yet it's at the root of a lot of employee performance problems where the employee is doing a lot of activity, but not delivering on expectations. I've worked with some brilliant engineers who failed because they were always off trying to reinvent the wheel with their own completely unnecessary framework or rewriting some code that didn't need to be touched. In each case their managers were practically begging them to just focus on delivering the tasks they were assigned, but they were still surprised when the performance management actions came along.
- notyourwork 1y ago
  As a former engineer who recently transitioned to management, this is precisely how engineers who are competent are perceived as underachieving. Focus on the right problems, put side quests on the back burner.
mcv 1y ago
I lean towards telling your manager what they should want. Put issues that you identify as important on the table and draw attention to them. Explain why they're important. Make them benefit from your expertise by being proactive about this sort of thing. My experience is still fairly limited with this, but I do have some successes.
- sfn42 1y ago
  Strongly agree. Our expertise is why we are there, when I tell my managers that something is important, they listen. We need this feature, but before we can build this feature we need to make some changes to one or a few parts of the system. Otherwise we will be building on a bad foundation and fixing the foundation will be much more challenging after we have built on it.
varispeed 1y ago
If you are not a shareholder, then it is an incredibly poor advice. 1. Only do bare minimum. They key is to keep your manager unhappy, but not unhappy enough to fire you. 2. If there is nothing in particular to do, always spend time on things that will benefit you directly. For instance, upskill to find a better job, read, volunteer or even simply entertain yourself to keep mental health in check. Before you do something, always ask yourself a question: am I paid enough to do this? Answer is almost always: No.
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herval 1y ago
It’s good advice for the average engineer who wants to chug along. Not exactly anything that would classify as “influence” though. Great staff engineers actually set direction (which includes convincing management), instead of trying to coddle their managers. I particularly enjoy working with those - they’re rare findings (particularly in the usual American corporate culture)
lowbloodsugar 1y ago
>2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future, and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. Fuuuuck no. If he thinks you did it in 24 hours then he’ll expect you to do it in 24 hours next time too, instead of the three weeks it actually took you. Work on something amazing. Also, who doesn’t have something to do???
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lazyant 1y ago
'make your manager look good'
- Aztar 1y ago
  Make your manager's manager look good. Because only then you would be able to go up the food chain (assuming that is the goal. your manager may become your competitor/peer in this case).

Trasmatta 1y ago

I would rather not live my life with the sole purpose of people pleasing managers

okdood64 1y ago
What? This is what you are paid to do in your work life. This isn’t a thread about your whole life.
smallnix 1y ago
In case you can share an alternate strategy to make a career in a large tech company, please do, would be interested.
- Trasmatta 1y ago
  That's the crux. I don't want a career in a large tech company.
  - the_af 1y ago
    Is working in a small tech company any different?
    - Trasmatta 1y ago
      Not really, I'd love to get out of tech entirely.
    - rjh29 1y ago
      Massively different. You generally have more autonomy, fewer managers, more responsibility and wear more hats. In my experience no corporate fake people pleasing or PR language or HR nonsense. Just regular people talking normally trying to get stuff done.
    - jcheng 1y ago
      It's SO different. It doesn't guarantee that life is good, but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. If you're objectively awesome, the chances of you being sidelined for political reasons is pretty low when there are like 10 people in the whole company. It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not. Conversely, if you're mediocre, there's nowhere to hide. Or maybe instead of saying there aren't politics at small companies, it's more accurate to say that there are politics, but they're simple--everyone strives to make the (hopefully benevolent) dictator, I mean founder, happy. If your founder is awesome, life is good. If your founder is not awesome, well, everyone is going to have a bad time anyway.
      - Aurornis 1y ago
        > but politics plays a much smaller role, especially at the very small sizes. I thoroughly believed this after working at a small company with little politics in one of my first jobs. But then a couple of the later small companies/startups I worked for had politics to such an insane degree that I no longer believe small companies are better or worse in general. They just have a larger variance. The larger the company, the more the workforce trends toward the mean. When you hire 10,000 people you can't exclusively build a company of low-politics people. With a 10-person company you technically can build that company of mostyl 1-in-100 employees who work well together. However, you could also stumble into a company where you're working with 10 people who have worked together previously and have no intention of bringing you into their inner circle. The politics at this latter type of company is truly next level hell because there's nowhere to go, unlike at a big company or FAANG where you can transfer teams or rely on your resume to get you into the application process at another company easily. > It's just obvious to everyone who is delivering value and who is not. In my experience at highly political small companies, this doesn't matter. The people running the political show want the upper echelon of the company to be composed of their close friends and allies. They want the people who produce to be stuck doing the grunt work.
  - mystifyingpoi 1y ago
    > I don't want a career in a large tech company I would swear by this when I started working in IT, but 3y later I changed job and took a gig at a big corporation. It was eye opening and jaw dropping. Everything was lightyears ahead in terms of tech, management, money, investments in people, and much more compared to the small company. It geniuinely made me mad for not doing this sooner.
    - crystal_revenge 1y ago
      Strange, I've had the opposite experience: I've mostly worked with small startups and every few job changes will try a go at a big tech company. I'm always shocked at the gap in talent between small startups and large tech companies. Far and away all of the best and most talented coworkers I've had have been at small startups. Of course there's a lot of variance among small companies (much moreso than large ones). But the one thing that all small companies have is people who can actually get shit done not matter what it requires. The amount of "not my lane" nonsense that occupies corporate life is both exhausting and boring. I understand why this exists for practical reasons, but it's no fun.
- bdangubic 1y ago
  you should do everything possible to make a career in a small company. after three decades as SWE it is my #1 (there is not even remotely close #2) advise for everyone in the early stages of their career
  - andrew_lettuce 1y ago
    The politics in small companies are far more extreme in my experience.
  - scarface_74 1y ago
    I am 51. I love small companies. My second best experience was working as the second technical hire by a then new to the company CTO who was hired to bring technical leadership into the company. The two non technical brothers who were founders outsourced the development to a consulting company until they found product market fit. But I still did the same thing the article and commenters suggested. I stayed strictly aligned with what the CTO wanted and just from that, I was able to guide the entire technical architecture of the company for two years even though I had no hands on experience with AWS. Let’s not be fooled though. My next job after that startup that had 60 people was at the second largest employer in the US - AWS working in the consulting division (AWS Professional Services). It was an immediate 50% bump in pay. An even greater contrast is that an intern I mentored got a return offer at 22 in 2022 that was the same I made at 46 in 2020. They are now at 25 making slightly more than I’m making at a medium size third party consulting company working full time as a staff consultant. Your principled stand is leaving a lot of money on the table. At 51, I would rather get a daily anal probe with a cactus than ever work at any large company again and I have turned down a position that was going to be created for me at another large well known non technical company where a former coworker was a director and ignored overtures from GCP in their professional services department that would pay a lot more. I also wouldn’t like the company I work at now with around 700 people if I weren’t brought in as a staff engineer where I have almost complete autonomy on how I lead my projects and the ear of the CxOs But let’s not pretend the extra $75K to $100K+ I could be making isn’t worth playing politics. I’m just at a place in life where I can prioritize other things than money. Also, at 51, I’ve learned a few things. Not to make your “career” at any company and to always be prepared to jump ship when the environment changes or the raises don’t keep up with the market. I’m now on my 10th job.
- exodust 1y ago
  The alternate strategy is loyalty to "the business" rather than any particular person. When you're invested in the success of the business above all else, and you make that known, you'll carve out a position where you're valued. Not because you went on a "carving out your importance" mission, but because your energy goes into your work, and the details and care for the long term business objectives. Also... you can then enjoy yourself more, which opens creativity which opens innovation. Sometimes this might mean disagreeing with managers or working on stuff nobody really knows you're working on right now. > "So if you want to get something technical done in a tech company, you ought to wait for the appropriate wave" No. That doesn't work. You have to start building it. Don't wait.
  - YZF 1y ago
    I agree with this. That's been my take throughput my pretty long career and was a recipe for success. You still need to: 1. Be good at what you do. 2. Be good at politics/communication when that's needed. 3. Be in an organization that has good people and also cares. There are organizations where there's just a complete disconnect from the business for various reasons. Dysfunctional.
  - rafaelero 1y ago
    This is a good strategy, imo. I was following it for almost a year and I was having a blast working in a startup. Then a new manager came along and started to dictate how things should be done without much input from the technical team. I kept fighting for what I thought was good for the product instead of aligning with him. In the end it was just too stressful (the manager was not only an idiot but also rude). I resigned, but I wouldn't have done any other way. I simply can't be made to do dumb things from uncurious people.
    - exodust 1y ago
      It's a shame when resigning is the only way out. Before reaching that point, the usual strategies should be attempted: Picking your battles; Negotiate rather than fight; Be better at analytics and research than anyone else. So you have the data to measure or predict success about a particular feature or direction. Armed with your data, you must carefully communicate findings without shaming others. It's a fine line between fostering a positive work environment in the face of misguided decisions, and being condescending or derisive towards other team members. There is no silver bullet, but a touch of self-deprecating humour never hurt. If you advice isn't taken, you'll have a non-snarky receipt. Any email written with an irritated tone, will look twice as bad months later.
- georgeburdell 1y ago
  I don’t know if it’s different, but I always carve out about a day a week to work on “skunkworks” projects that will benefit my team but that nobody has asked for yet. Then, when it does get asked for, I have a rough solution ready to go.
  - smallnix 1y ago
    I think this ties very well into the advise of the article and is not orthogonal / different.
tamimio 1y ago
“You lack soft skills and initiative; unfortunately, you will not be promoted while having more responsibilities” - the manager who wants to be pleased. One time a manager hinted to me to be a snitch on my coworkers just so he could see I have “leader” attributes to get promoted later. Stay away from corps..
chausen 1y ago
It doesn’t have to be your some purpose; it could be within your normal working hours. It’s basically just choosing a goal to be intentional with at work.
marcinzm 1y ago
No matter what founders and managers say the reality is that 95% of tech jobs are meaningless outside the capitalistic flywheel. You're not making the world a better place. You're moving some bits around and extracting a profit from it. Pleasing a manager or pleasing the capitalistic flywheel doesn't seem much different to me.
010101010101 1y ago
This makes for a pithy sound bite, but that’s pretty much only possible if you’re independently wealthy to the point of being in the “fuck you money” category of wealth. There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. Even if you’re a solo contractor you’re going to spend your time pleasing clients - sure, you can shed bad ones more easily than you can a bad manager, but you’re still beholden to someone who controls the purse. If you found a start up you’re pleasing your investors. If you’re a CEO of a large company you’re pleasing your board. Work is just the act of pleasing other people in specific ways based on your skillset.
- snozolli 1y ago
  There’s no part of expecting people to hand you money that doesn’t obviously lead to your sole purpose being to please those people. IMO, the people who need to be pleased are the customers, and, IME, management's expectations very often run contrary to those of the customers. Turns out that anagement really doesn't like negative feedback from engineers which turns out to be echoed by users. I'd rather see career advice on how to prevent management from tanking the company without causing them to resent the engineer(s).

codazoda 1y ago

I read number 2 more as being ready with your own agenda items. For example, if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself. If you have something prepared and then there’s a site speed, SEO, or series of bug complaints you might be able to pitch your minimal ideas as part of that solution. I like the concept but I don’t know how well it would work in practice or how I would document my preparations for some point in the future. I do often wonder if I should run my work a bit like I run my blog though, generating documents about why and how. Maybe keeping them in wait for that opportunity. That could be a lot of extra work that never sees the light, but we probably do a lot of that anyway?

bradlys 1y ago
To flesh out things to where you could actually make a reasonable pitch with things like realistic time estimates and documents that would be useful to read then you'd have to have already done it, it'd be trivial, or you apparently have plenty of spare time to do serious spikes in your day to day. You'd also have to have the spare time to update these project ideas as the months pass, the product and codebase changes, etc. I'm often convinced people extrapolate their insane luck with teams+companies and assume every other company/team can replicate their results. I have a hard time finding people in high level positions who give the slightest of fucks about engineering focused tasks but I am someone who works on product teams. The target goal is always about making money - not saving money or improving velocity.
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varispeed 1y ago
> if you want to make a code base more minimal, have a POC and some details worked out for when the opportunity presents itself. Why would you want to do that? You will not get the cream for such work. From experience, you'll never get recognition for these things, you will never get paid more and most certainly they may dump more work at you. Taking initiative and improving something never pays off to you. Unless you are the type of person that looks out of the window at the company car park and sees board member in a branch new Lambo and then say to yourself proudly "I did that".

akudha 1y ago

Or better options - just do the job you were hired for and go home or find that rare job (if possible) where engineering has a bigger role than politics. It is not pleasant to play a guessing game trying to please some manager, just because they’re your boss. Life is too short for stupid games

andrew_lettuce 1y ago
If you think corporate politics is just a stupid game you'll never be happy with what you accomplish and lucky to keep your job. Awareness and understanding, being able to tie effort to outcomes, positioning and sales; these are not guessing games.
marcinzm 1y ago
> engineering has a bigger role than politics I've never seen two people fight to the death over something meaningless as much as some engineers do. Politics is the end product of multiple people working together with different views. Engineering doesn't save you from it. Engineers who think it does tend to cause more political turmoil in teams than anyone else.

andrew_lettuce 1y ago

I'll add that all this goes up the food chain and is good advice for engineering managers too. As a director reporting to the CTO I tried to do this as well.

marcinzm 1y ago

I'd add: Don't do things those with more political power than you manager don't want done unless someone with even more power publicly tells you to. That doesn't mean you do what they want done but simply that you avoid pissing them off. Enemies are rarely worth making and the majority of managers will throw you under the bus to save their own skin in that situation.

Aurornis 1y ago

> 1. If your manager has something in particular they want you to do, you should do it. This point seems obvious, but it's one topics I've had to coach many early career people on over and over again. Many of the people who were having difficulties or heading toward PIP could be turned around by implementing a simple loop where they: 1. Ask their manager for the top priority, explicitly. Re-confirm the top priority every time you encounter a question about what to work on or new information that might change the situation. 2. Write it down. Put it somewhere visible. Check it every morning. Remind yourself about the top priority. 3. Do the top priority until it's done. Confirm that your manager agrees that it's done when you think it's done. It sounds simple to those of us who internalized these loops early in our careers, but some people don't see it so clearly until it's laid out for them. They get distracted, go on side quests, take too many tasks from people who aren't their manager, or avoid their manager's requests in favor of a task they find more interesting.

gmfawcett 1y ago
Very well expressed. That's great early-career guidance, but also a good refresher for many senior staff.
- Aurornis 1y ago
  The simpler version is "Actually deliver on what you're asked to do". It sounds so simple that people get offended when you say that. Yet it's at the root of a lot of employee performance problems where the employee is doing a lot of activity, but not delivering on expectations. I've worked with some brilliant engineers who failed because they were always off trying to reinvent the wheel with their own completely unnecessary framework or rewriting some code that didn't need to be touched. In each case their managers were practically begging them to just focus on delivering the tasks they were assigned, but they were still surprised when the performance management actions came along.
notyourwork 1y ago
As a former engineer who recently transitioned to management, this is precisely how engineers who are competent are perceived as underachieving. Focus on the right problems, put side quests on the back burner.

mcv 1y ago

I lean towards telling your manager what they should want. Put issues that you identify as important on the table and draw attention to them. Explain why they're important. Make them benefit from your expertise by being proactive about this sort of thing. My experience is still fairly limited with this, but I do have some successes.

sfn42 1y ago
Strongly agree. Our expertise is why we are there, when I tell my managers that something is important, they listen. We need this feature, but before we can build this feature we need to make some changes to one or a few parts of the system. Otherwise we will be building on a bad foundation and fixing the foundation will be much more challenging after we have built on it.

varispeed 1y ago

If you are not a shareholder, then it is an incredibly poor advice. 1. Only do bare minimum. They key is to keep your manager unhappy, but not unhappy enough to fire you. 2. If there is nothing in particular to do, always spend time on things that will benefit you directly. For instance, upskill to find a better job, read, volunteer or even simply entertain yourself to keep mental health in check. Before you do something, always ask yourself a question: am I paid enough to do this? Answer is almost always: No.

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herval 1y ago

It’s good advice for the average engineer who wants to chug along. Not exactly anything that would classify as “influence” though. Great staff engineers actually set direction (which includes convincing management), instead of trying to coddle their managers. I particularly enjoy working with those - they’re rare findings (particularly in the usual American corporate culture)

lowbloodsugar 1y ago

>2. If your manager doesn't have something in particular they want you to do, you should figure out what they will want you to do in the future, and make any necessary preparations so that it will be doable when they want it. Fuuuuck no. If he thinks you did it in 24 hours then he’ll expect you to do it in 24 hours next time too, instead of the three weeks it actually took you. Work on something amazing. Also, who doesn’t have something to do???

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lazyant 1y ago

'make your manager look good'

Aztar 1y ago
Make your manager's manager look good. Because only then you would be able to go up the food chain (assuming that is the goal. your manager may become your competitor/peer in this case).