9 ms·

One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America

by postit 10mo ago

One thing I’ve learned in my 25+ year career is that if you don't own your narrative and your work, someone else will claim it - especially in corporate America. I have lost count of the brilliant engineers who were passed over for credit simply because someone less technically capable, but extremely popular, pulled the strings to steal the spotlight. You don't necessarily need to be in the spotlight, but you do need to leave a paper trail. Claim your work and inventions both internally and externally. You don't need to be a 'LinkedIn thought leader' to do this, just submit talks to conferences and find peers at other companies who understand the difference between those who build and those who only talk about building.

proc0 10mo ago
This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a career inside a corporate environment. There is too much politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's what it takes I might as well do something that I own and control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss. I always thought the point of being an employee and having a limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things. That's the fair tradeoff.
- jeffwass 10mo ago
  To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well. It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
  - shermantanktop 10mo ago
    Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler. You don’t have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever. You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it enough to avoid getting hurt by it. E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game players that your work is important.
    - cal_dent 10mo ago
      I so wish every new starter in professional working life is given a 101 on literally this. I've seen so many talented people over the years think they're above taking part in the corporate optics and then subsequently get bogged down by resentment watching lesser people getting pats on the back. The system is crap. It should all be about meritocracy and all that but it's not. It is what it is. People need to stop being naive shooting themselves in the foot EDIT The other thing to it is that its so infuriating because people who say they wish the game wasn't the game and genuinely could change things because they have the right sensibilities, and are talented enough to rise up to position where they can make decisions that matter, choose not to engage in the game to make that happen. Wake up, you're letting the "wrong people" (in your view) win.
- goalieca 10mo ago
  There’s too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I know so many programmers who simply want to solve the trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability more than anything.
  - TimTheTinker 10mo ago
    There are rare software companies where this is exactly what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG & SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great, stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals, it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the deep, focused feature work and problem solving. I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it.
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      I think no equity isn't necessarily worse than equity followed by bankruptcy :D
      - deleted 10mo ago
        [deleted]
    - tayo42 10mo ago
      What interesting problems have you solved recently?
      - LtWorf 10mo ago
        Most people are under NDAs
        twojacobtwo 10mo ago
        I'm pretty sure no one is going to be hunting down NDA infractions on HN unless the poster is silly enough to give specifics about the workplace and time at which they solved the problem. If it takes some kind of investigative work to piece together the most basic details, I think that's within the terms of most NDAs anyway.
- pixl97 10mo ago
  >meant that you don't worry about this things Not at all, that was a confused expectation. The problem here, at least I think, is you may be very unaware of the expectations of running ones own business. There are far more politics, more being cutthroat, tons of regulations you must be aware of that come with potential later penalties if you are not, legal threats, and more.
  - proc0 10mo ago
    I can see that, but then what's really broken is the education system. If what you say is true that means there is no such thing as being a specialist, at least not anymore, yet almost all universities train people to be specialists. Either industry should stop looking at academic degrees completely or schools should start teaching business first, and technical knowledge second, for most degrees (with exception of academia and research).
    - smj-edison 10mo ago
      My brother is studying economics right now, and he said everyone could use some basic economics knowledge, because getting an intuition for how markets work really helps you as you're looking for jobs and navigating around companies. Maybe business knowledge is better, but I'm personally biased towards the empiricism of economics :) You're onto something though about the need for awareness of how companies think and work.
    - pixl97 10mo ago
      This is somewhat correct, and somewhat not correct. The 'system' needs the following. People that are unaware of the system, that do the work, think it's a mediocrity, and don't play the game. Less people that play the game and reap all the rewards for doing the work without actually doing the work. The problem is once too many people play the game instead of doing the work the entire system falls apart.
- stack_framer 10mo ago
  This is exactly how I feel. I recently spent 30 months trying to qualify for a promotion, earnestly striving to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff engineer level. I accepted literally every single opportunity, offered by my manager and director of engineering, to take on extra work and show that I'm staff caliber. They were both eventually persuaded that I was ready, so they authored an 18-page "promotion packet" touting my many accomplishments—the marketing component you describe. This document was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee who, after two weeks of consideration, rejected my promotion. I am now channeling every ounce of my energy toward becoming my own boss. They have unwittingly started an unquenchable fire in me, and I eagerly await the day I can tender my resignation and tell them just how much they didn't deserve me.
notarobot123 10mo ago
It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect appearances either. Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand scheme of things.
- lotsofpulp 10mo ago
  That is because time and energy are limited resources, and measuring merit accurately is very costly. Measuring appearance is far less costly, and might serve as an acceptable proxy. And often times it might not.
- FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
  There’s rarely (maybe never) an objective and comprehensive measure of quality. Your concept of what merits matter is someone else’s advertising. No one is operating non-meritocratically, they just value different qualities from you.
lumost 10mo ago
this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion. Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if the first person finishes - but now the success is subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of the new individual. Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming of solutions.
cactus2093 10mo ago
I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work. What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem. There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something. I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way. Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.
alephnerd 10mo ago
You can own the narrative while also not being in the spotlight. At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in any organization. So long as you can promote you and your team's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Leadership - your place is secure. In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or responsibility. So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals for the year and can communicate that to the relevant subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.
nostrademons 10mo ago
So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy, Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't. I've found that trust is a currency in a corporate environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the success of a project but don't claim it, there's a decent chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. And in the process you'll built up a good reputation and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.
- rockinghigh 10mo ago
  As you suggested, promotions tend to come more slowly. You're also likely to hit a lower ceiling than someone who is better at promoting their work.
- 1dom 10mo ago
  > But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. This is only true if average tenure of leadership and management is more than a couple of years.
WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago
That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.
- TimByte 10mo ago
  But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected
  - micromacrofoot 10mo ago
    It is a scam, it's objective. If you live in ignorance of this you will eventually be taken advantage of. There is nowhere on the planet you can live where you can take people or systems of people at their word.
    - fragmede 10mo ago
      If it's only an eventuality, then doesn't that imply that you can mostly take people at their word? If you do nine deals, and get scammed on the the tenth, then doesn't that mean those first nine people are honest and could be taken at their word?
      - micromacrofoot 10mo ago
        lol no the eventuality is because a lot of people are just too poor to even be allowed to engage in deals — they're largely living in faceless systems where they're pre-scammed by faceless corporations
    - venturecruelty 10mo ago
      Sorry, but this feels like a very American take. There are places in the world that still have high social cohesion and high trust. Not everyone is out to get you everywhere all the time, just in societies which encourage that sort of relating to others.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
reactordev 10mo ago
It shouldn’t be this way. Merit should be the metric. But it’s true. No matter how good or bad your numbers are, if Bob likes you, you’re good. Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only your mother would love, be a writer… but get your voice out there.
TimByte 10mo ago
You don't have to self-promote aggressively, but you do have to advocate for your work
venturecruelty 10mo ago
Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone. We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system that didn't even exist until very recently. So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I can, while spending time on the things that actually matter: music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.
- mbajkowski 10mo ago
  Seems to me you have your Life Razor, per Sahil Bloom, pretty much in place for your current stage in life
- anon7725 10mo ago
  A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
- bird0861 10mo ago
  You seem like the type of coworker I would accept less pay to work with. Actually at a crossroads right now, did my research on my prospects and have narrowed it down to two places I most expect to be surrounded by good coworkers and managers. Cheers.
agentultra 10mo ago
This has happened to me several times! Hamming, in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, also encourages this. But the last edition was in 1994 and he was writing from the position of having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career. We don’t really have that these days. It’s great if you can find a way to be a non-fungible developer. I think part of the strategy is taking the spotlight and managing perceptions of your work. You don’t get to choose what you work on most of the time but you can make sure that it’s visible and useful. As the author suggests, and I think I aspire to myself, is building good tools and libraries that people appreciate and depend on.
deleted 10mo ago
[deleted]
hedayet 10mo ago
I can think of a couple of times when I wasn’t the best at something, yet still got opportunities simply because someone well-established in that space liked me. And I can think of the opposite too - situations where I was at a disadvantage because someone higher up just didn’t like me. For me, it’s more or less balanced at a balance at this point of time. But most people around me, I don’t think they’ve been as lucky.
ergocoder 10mo ago
Working at FAANG kinda bypasses this once you reach the "rest & vest" phrase. It's like whatever I don't give a fuck. I've met tons of them. They don't care about credits because they've earned so much.
oatlgr 10mo ago
This hits close to home. I'm UK-based remote working for a US company, and I've seen this play out more times than I'd like. Led the architecture and design on products that went on to do $100m+, only for someone else to waltz in and take the credit once I'd moved on to the next thing. The annoying bit is that being good at your job often means you get dragged into the next hard problem before the last one's had its moment. Meanwhile, whoever happens to be standing there when the champagne corks pop gets all the credit. The paper trail advice is bang on. I'd just add - document decisions as you make them, not after the fact. Architecture decision records, design docs with your name on them, commit histories that tell the story. Handy when people's memories start getting conveniently fuzzy.

by postit 10mo ago

proc0 10mo ago

This is one of the main reasons I'm trying to pivot away from a career inside a corporate environment. There is too much politics. I wish it was just do the work and go home, and get rewarded for the work that was completed, but instead there is a huge self-promotion (as in marketing) component. If that's what it takes I might as well do something that I own and control. If I'm going to need to worry about how to market my own work then I might as well try and at least not have a boss. I always thought the point of being an employee and having a limited paycheck meant that you don't worry about this things. That's the fair tradeoff.

jeffwass 10mo ago
To be fair, this issue isn’t endemic only to big companies. I’ve seen similar even in academia, some people just know how to “play the game” and play it very well. It really depends on the culture of where you are, which can even vary team by team in the same org.
- shermantanktop 10mo ago
  Some people seem willfully ignorant of the game. When confronted with the reality of it, they turn away, complain that it exists, and act like a bullied middle schooler. You don’t have to enthusiastically endorse the game. You can learn it, just like you learn Go or Rust or whatever. You can refuse to actively play it, but also be aware of it enough to avoid getting hurt by it. E.g. figure out the minimal effort for convincing game players that your work is important.
  - cal_dent 10mo ago
    I so wish every new starter in professional working life is given a 101 on literally this. I've seen so many talented people over the years think they're above taking part in the corporate optics and then subsequently get bogged down by resentment watching lesser people getting pats on the back. The system is crap. It should all be about meritocracy and all that but it's not. It is what it is. People need to stop being naive shooting themselves in the foot EDIT The other thing to it is that its so infuriating because people who say they wish the game wasn't the game and genuinely could change things because they have the right sensibilities, and are talented enough to rise up to position where they can make decisions that matter, choose not to engage in the game to make that happen. Wake up, you're letting the "wrong people" (in your view) win.
goalieca 10mo ago
There’s too much emphasis on career growth into leadership. I know so many programmers who simply want to solve the trickiest of technical problems, do good work they can feel proud of, and go home to their families. They want stability more than anything.
- TimTheTinker 10mo ago
  There are rare software companies where this is exactly what programmers do. The pay is lower than at FAANG & SV/LA/NYC startups, but work-life balance is great, stability is great, and most of all they get to just focus on doing great work. It's not about making quarterly goals, it's about stewarding (or perhaps gardening) a software project for many years. Engineers grow a lot from all the deep, focused feature work and problem solving. I worked at such a place for 15 years. The downsides for me were lower pay, no equity, and not getting broad industry experience. I ended up leaving, and I now make a lot more money, but I do miss it.
  - LtWorf 10mo ago
    I think no equity isn't necessarily worse than equity followed by bankruptcy :D
    - deleted 10mo ago
      [deleted]
  - tayo42 10mo ago
    What interesting problems have you solved recently?
    - LtWorf 10mo ago
      Most people are under NDAs
      - twojacobtwo 10mo ago
        I'm pretty sure no one is going to be hunting down NDA infractions on HN unless the poster is silly enough to give specifics about the workplace and time at which they solved the problem. If it takes some kind of investigative work to piece together the most basic details, I think that's within the terms of most NDAs anyway.
pixl97 10mo ago
>meant that you don't worry about this things Not at all, that was a confused expectation. The problem here, at least I think, is you may be very unaware of the expectations of running ones own business. There are far more politics, more being cutthroat, tons of regulations you must be aware of that come with potential later penalties if you are not, legal threats, and more.
- proc0 10mo ago
  I can see that, but then what's really broken is the education system. If what you say is true that means there is no such thing as being a specialist, at least not anymore, yet almost all universities train people to be specialists. Either industry should stop looking at academic degrees completely or schools should start teaching business first, and technical knowledge second, for most degrees (with exception of academia and research).
  - smj-edison 10mo ago
    My brother is studying economics right now, and he said everyone could use some basic economics knowledge, because getting an intuition for how markets work really helps you as you're looking for jobs and navigating around companies. Maybe business knowledge is better, but I'm personally biased towards the empiricism of economics :) You're onto something though about the need for awareness of how companies think and work.
  - pixl97 10mo ago
    This is somewhat correct, and somewhat not correct. The 'system' needs the following. People that are unaware of the system, that do the work, think it's a mediocrity, and don't play the game. Less people that play the game and reap all the rewards for doing the work without actually doing the work. The problem is once too many people play the game instead of doing the work the entire system falls apart.
stack_framer 10mo ago
This is exactly how I feel. I recently spent 30 months trying to qualify for a promotion, earnestly striving to demonstrate that I could operate at the staff engineer level. I accepted literally every single opportunity, offered by my manager and director of engineering, to take on extra work and show that I'm staff caliber. They were both eventually persuaded that I was ready, so they authored an 18-page "promotion packet" touting my many accomplishments—the marketing component you describe. This document was then presented to an anonymous promotion committee who, after two weeks of consideration, rejected my promotion. I am now channeling every ounce of my energy toward becoming my own boss. They have unwittingly started an unquenchable fire in me, and I eagerly await the day I can tender my resignation and tell them just how much they didn't deserve me.

notarobot123 10mo ago

It's pretty demoralizing to realize that appearances matter more than merit in careers/politics/dating/business/etc. The pragmatic approach is to not give up on merit but not neglect appearances either. Still, the idealist in me hates this. It feels like quality should win out over advertising yet it rarely does in the grand scheme of things.

lotsofpulp 10mo ago
That is because time and energy are limited resources, and measuring merit accurately is very costly. Measuring appearance is far less costly, and might serve as an acceptable proxy. And often times it might not.
FromTheFirstIn 10mo ago
There’s rarely (maybe never) an objective and comprehensive measure of quality. Your concept of what merits matter is someone else’s advertising. No one is operating non-meritocratically, they just value different qualities from you.

lumost 10mo ago

this is the biggest benefit of 1:1's in my opinion. Often, individuals can claim credit simply by being first and loudest. For example, and individual can highlight a problem area that someone is already working on in the team and loudly talk about the flaws in the current approach and how they will solve it. The individual need not actually solve the task if the first person finishes - but now the success is subconsciously attributed to the thought leadership/approach of the new individual. Good managers/leadership teams have mechanisms to limit this type of strategy, but it requires them to talk to everyone on the team - listen for unsaid feedback and look at hard artifacts. Otherwise you quickly have a team of people who are great at nothing more than talking about problems and dreaming of solutions.

cactus2093 10mo ago

I've always kind of expected it to work this way, with people being cutthroat and stealing credit for other people's work. What I have seen in reality is a lot more nuanced. There are a lot of good ideas that will simply die if nobody pitches them the right way, i.e. if no one gets the rest of the team/org/company to understand and agree that it solves an important problem. There are also very few novel ideas in a mature business or technology space. Every time I think I've come up with one, I search the internal company docs and often someone had mentioned the same thing 5 years ago in some long-forgotten design doc or something. I've come to realize that the hard thing and the bottleneck for a good idea to have real impact is not the idea itself or the execution, it's pulling the right strings to make space for the idea and get it accepted. At a small scale, in your own team or ownership domain, this isn't necessary and you can just build things and let the results speak for themselves. But the amount of impact that thing has on the broader company will be limited if you don't pull the strings the right way. Some people despise this idea and in that case, a big company is probably not the right place for you. But most of the cases I've seen of "brilliant engineers passed over for credit" were people not realizing and not doing this necessary part of the job. If someone else steps in and gets the idea more widely recognized after you had let it stall and moved onto the next thing, then 1. usually you do still some partial recognition for it so it's a win/win and 2. the other person is not really stealing credit, because if they had done nothing the idea would have just died and you wouldn't have gotten credit anyway.

alephnerd 10mo ago

You can own the narrative while also not being in the spotlight. At the end of the day, only a handful of stakeholders matter in any organization. So long as you can promote you and your team's initiatives to your manager, your skip manager, and a couple key members of Product, Sales, Customer Success, and Leadership - your place is secure. In fact, in most cases I would say a mass spotlight is actually a net negative, because it only increases the risk that someone might view you as a potential competitor for either budget or responsibility. So long as you remain aligned to the business's stated goals for the year and can communicate that to the relevant subsegment of stakeholders, a massive spotlight is unnecessary.

nostrademons 10mo ago

So I'm not sure about this, particularly in the context of this article. I think it definitely applies to the splashy, Spotlight, one-off projects that will make a career with one shot. But a lot of careers aren't made that way, and this article is specifically talking about the ones that aren't. I've found that trust is a currency in a corporate environment, possibly the most important one. And trust is built over time. If you work behind the scenes to ensure the success of a project but don't claim it, there's a decent chance somebody else will, and maybe it'll appear in their promo packet. But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. And in the process you'll built up a good reputation and network, so even if leadership gets replaced there are lots of other people that want to work with you. Promotions come slower at first, but they eventually catch up since you don't need to suffer the resets of failed projects and new roles.

rockinghigh 10mo ago
As you suggested, promotions tend to come more slowly. You're also likely to hit a lower ceiling than someone who is better at promoting their work.
1dom 10mo ago
> But if you are in the vicinity of enough successful projects, over a long period of time, there's a good chance that leadership will notice that the common element is you. This is only true if average tenure of leadership and management is more than a couple of years.

WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago

That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.

TimByte 10mo ago
But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected
- micromacrofoot 10mo ago
  It is a scam, it's objective. If you live in ignorance of this you will eventually be taken advantage of. There is nowhere on the planet you can live where you can take people or systems of people at their word.
  - fragmede 10mo ago
    If it's only an eventuality, then doesn't that imply that you can mostly take people at their word? If you do nine deals, and get scammed on the the tenth, then doesn't that mean those first nine people are honest and could be taken at their word?
    - micromacrofoot 10mo ago
      lol no the eventuality is because a lot of people are just too poor to even be allowed to engage in deals — they're largely living in faceless systems where they're pre-scammed by faceless corporations
  - venturecruelty 10mo ago
    Sorry, but this feels like a very American take. There are places in the world that still have high social cohesion and high trust. Not everyone is out to get you everywhere all the time, just in societies which encourage that sort of relating to others.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

reactordev 10mo ago

It shouldn’t be this way. Merit should be the metric. But it’s true. No matter how good or bad your numbers are, if Bob likes you, you’re good. Keep polishing those soft skills and if you have a face only your mother would love, be a writer… but get your voice out there.

TimByte 10mo ago

You don't have to self-promote aggressively, but you do have to advocate for your work

venturecruelty 10mo ago

Personally, I don't care. Pay me and leave me the hell alone. We get 80 short years on this beautiful blue marble, if we're exceedingly lucky, and I refuse to spend one red second of that playing stupid games to excel in a sclerotic economic system that didn't even exist until very recently. So I'm going to continue to try to grind it out as best as I can, while spending time on the things that actually matter: music, art, making delicious food for me and my friends, my hobbies, my family, my local community. Corporate America is bereft of joy and meaning anyway. Maybe it makes me some sort of sucker, but I don't care. I'd rather live.

mbajkowski 10mo ago
Seems to me you have your Life Razor, per Sahil Bloom, pretty much in place for your current stage in life
anon7725 10mo ago
A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.
bird0861 10mo ago
You seem like the type of coworker I would accept less pay to work with. Actually at a crossroads right now, did my research on my prospects and have narrowed it down to two places I most expect to be surrounded by good coworkers and managers. Cheers.

agentultra 10mo ago

This has happened to me several times! Hamming, in his book The Art of Doing Science and Engineering, also encourages this. But the last edition was in 1994 and he was writing from the position of having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career. We don’t really have that these days. It’s great if you can find a way to be a non-fungible developer. I think part of the strategy is taking the spotlight and managing perceptions of your work. You don’t get to choose what you work on most of the time but you can make sure that it’s visible and useful. As the author suggests, and I think I aspire to myself, is building good tools and libraries that people appreciate and depend on.

deleted 10mo ago

[deleted]

hedayet 10mo ago

I can think of a couple of times when I wasn’t the best at something, yet still got opportunities simply because someone well-established in that space liked me. And I can think of the opposite too - situations where I was at a disadvantage because someone higher up just didn’t like me. For me, it’s more or less balanced at a balance at this point of time. But most people around me, I don’t think they’ve been as lucky.

ergocoder 10mo ago

Working at FAANG kinda bypasses this once you reach the "rest & vest" phrase. It's like whatever I don't give a fuck. I've met tons of them. They don't care about credits because they've earned so much.

oatlgr 10mo ago

This hits close to home. I'm UK-based remote working for a US company, and I've seen this play out more times than I'd like. Led the architecture and design on products that went on to do $100m+, only for someone else to waltz in and take the credit once I'd moved on to the next thing. The annoying bit is that being good at your job often means you get dragged into the next hard problem before the last one's had its moment. Meanwhile, whoever happens to be standing there when the champagne corks pop gets all the credit. The paper trail advice is bang on. I'd just add - document decisions as you make them, not after the fact. Architecture decision records, design docs with your name on them, commit histories that tell the story. Handy when people's memories start getting conveniently fuzzy.