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> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommen
by gyomu 11mo ago
> "I also supported cloud computing, participating in 110 customer meetings, and created a company-wide strategy to win back the cloud with 33 specific recommendations, in collaboration with others across 6 organizations."
Man people keep count of this stuff?! Maybe I should too, it does make flexing easier.
- _ea1k 11mo agoA lot of people consider score keeping like this to be more important than the job itself. I can't even say that they are wrong.
- cowsandmilk 11mo agoIf you look at many of his recent blog entries, it is clear he has felt the need to quantify his impact to prove he isn’t less effective as a remote employee in Australia working for a company in the US.
- chanux 11mo ago"Count your meetings" Wouldn't hurt to try!
- nunez 11mo agoUse gcalcli to search for meetings with customer invited. That's it! Also, for an engineer that isn't in sales, 110 customer meetings is A LOT.
- jcelerier 11mo ago... is it? I had 14 meetings with externals this week only lol
- gct 11mo agoAt big tech you have to quantify your value like this regularly, so yeah everyone keeps track of the minutiae.
- SoftTalker 11mo agoI guess they don’t know how or don’t bother to evaluate people on what they actually contribute? Just number of meetings attended, number of tickets closed?
- brailsafe 11mo agoKeeping track of actual value would require actually rewarding people proportionally; all jobs ever only really care about how often you're on time or your meeting attendance record.
- komali2 11mo agoRewarding people proportionally is a macro-level unsolved problem. Kropotkin wrote it about it and his solution was to throw his hands in the air and say fuck it, labor value is impossible to accurately evaluate, and thus he invented anarchist communism. Just look at all the weird quirks our world does to labor value: the same exact job in two different locations for a global employer (say, Google), selling to a global market, pays differently depending on "local labor market prices." In 2025 for engineering what on earth is a "local labor market?" An optimization coming from an engineer in Taiwan saves you the same money as if it comes from an engineer in SF but the SF engineer gets 8x the reward for doing the work. Luxury goods and electronics cost the same in both places. Buying property is only slightly cheaper in Taipei vs sf (yes really), vehicles cost more in Taiwan. Food and healthcare is cheaper in Taiwan, and that alone I guess means the Taiwanese engineer is worth 1/8th the SF engineer, to make sure the sf engineer can afford 16$ burritos? Many other quirks. You point out another one: labor often isn't rewarded based on real value to a company, for many reasons but one of which is that managers often don't understand the job of the people they're managing and so apply management relevant KPIs to disciplines where those KPIs don't make any sense. Engineering, for example, doesn't correlate actual value add to the company via meetings attended or customers met, but that won't stop management from applying those KPIs and thinking it does! I'm torn between thinking we keep things this way out of ignorance vs we keep it this way maliciously so the management class (which sets the rates) doesn't get written out of labor agreements altogether because they're often useless vs if we didn't keep up this charade, capitalism would just collapse entirely.
- Neywiny 11mo agoI mean maybe. We often have weekly customer meetings. One of my programs has 2 customers, we meet with both weekly. So do I put idk 200+ customer meetings? That seems like a weird metric because it's like "compiled code 400 times." I've seen resumes that have the same vibe. We did not hire them. Sometimes it's very telling what people think are accomplishments.
- SanjayMehta 11mo agoAll startups in due course turn into Byzantine labyrinths of bureaucracy. Only the record keepers survive.
- methuselah_in 11mo agoIsn't that show-off? I mean you have achieved is good but feels like bragging about it ! Just a thought
- brendangregg 11mo agoI like to measure things. In real life and on computers. But I also have a couple of work reasons for it: As a remote worker, I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works. As a senior employee, I'm also under pressure to regularly report where my time is spent.
- mi_lk 11mo agoIt's your personal blog though. But again nothing wrong with turning that into a form of LinkedIn post
- lopmkoihl 11mo ago> I'm under extra pressure to prove that remoteness works. Did keeping track and reporting that number help prove this?
- yvdriess 11mo agoIt doesn't need to prove that. It needs to produce plausible data that appeases either your direct or +1 manager.
- zx8080 11mo agoYeah, it's how everywhere is measured. But I like to remember Joel Spolsky's takes on measuring everything, including his famous book and blog: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-management-method/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2006/08/09/the-econ-101-manag...
- graemep 11mo agoContrary to the usual opinion on HN, this provides a good reason to do an MBA! You should learn enough economics that if you are even a bit insightful you will avoid Econ 101 thinking, you will learn about things like intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and a lot of other things relevant to management.
- 10mo ago
- lopmkoihl 11mo agoThe fact that they were busy keeping count during those 110 occasions and for every other activity clearly tells that they nothing better to do. You have to be loud about such numbers when you have very little meaningful work to show for.
- utopiah 11mo agoParse your calendar export (.ics) file and count events of a certain name and voila?
- pjmlp 11mo agoOf course, always take notes, they will help when doing escalations, or justify oneself in review meetings.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo agoWhile I have a personal career document and have had one for years where I have all of my major accomplishments in STAR format. This seems a bit much. When I was at BigTech, there was an internal system where you recorded your major accomplishments and the impact they had. But I would never write it up on a public blog post like this. I am assuming the author of the post must be someone well known in the industry for it to make it to the front page of Hacker News. If his intent was to promote himself so he could get another job, I’m sure that he has a network where a few messages would lead him to one. Even in my little niche of the world where in the grand scheme of things I’m a nobody, I was able to lean on my network at 50 after being Amazoned in 2023 and have three offers that were at least a lateral move within two weeks. I had one fall into my lap last year too that I accepted based on my network.