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The 7 Habits of Highly Overrated People

466 points by edandersen 13y ago

marincounty 13y ago
If Moses was the most modest man in the world; would he even make a statement claiming he was the most modest man in the world? I can handle a little self promotion, but it's always from the wrong guy. Too many of those wrong guys had wealthy fathers who financed every thing. I guess in order to get laid, or promoted they need to let people know what "talents" they have? Some of you computer guru's are the worst offenders.
fragsworth 13y ago
The author starts by claiming he was surprised that he couldn't come up with positive things about a coworker, but then goes on to describe a list of grievances about someone who was clearly intolerable. He even mentions this later: > If you’re currently doing them, stop. I’m not saying this because you’ll be insufferable (though you will be) His initial "mistaken" judgment ("how did I get this so wrong? Am I just an idiot?") of the person in question just doesn't seem genuine in retrospect.
- jschmitz28 13y ago
  I read that as him starting to truly pay attention and notice these behaviors in other people after the original guy had left (and not in the original guy himself).
- zainny 13y ago
  Honestly I don't think any part of the question is genuine. It's all basically a setup for complaining about his coworkers.
001sky 13y ago
A follow up post on resume/interviewing would be equally illuminating. Every organization needs its team players and people who are 'useful' rather than merely 'pruducutive' in the sense of objective talent. But the bozo-factor is more what this essay is getting at, and it seems for the most part these are the folks best left in place at their current gigs.
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codeonfire 13y ago
I could write a book on these types of tactics. For instance, in a meeting that involves your boss, command your coworkers to do what they were all already going to do. "Commit that change and send out an email describing what you changed." They can't not do their job, so it appears to your boss that everyone else is taking orders from you. If someone challenges you, passive-aggressively suggest a time they can get help from you.
- ExpiredLink 13y ago
  I have seen this, too. But all those tactics can and will backfire. Soon the 'overrated' will be cut off from information and support.
- krisgee 13y ago
  >I could write a book on these types of tactics. It's called the 48 laws of power. Specifically your example is Rules 6,7 and arguably 34.
ritchiea 13y ago
How does this kind of stuff get voted up? He's clever, but ultimately just doing a lot of complaining about his co-workers.
- Aynatix 13y ago
  I agree.
- perlpimp 13y ago
  what is being said closely resembles corporate/government structure and it's people (successful) ones at least by my experience. Mostly doing fiercely mediocre job and doing the social part they advance themselves for sole benefit of themselves. Where this goes against the grain of hn community is that people who gather here are self starter types and have started or looking up to who did start their own gig to avoid being in the same environment where people like that strive - corporate ladder climbers etc..
- Ma8ee 13y ago
  Because it helps us see patterns that we might not be aware of otherwise.
auctiontheory 13y ago
Some of these habits may indeed be true of overrated people, although some may just be true of successful people. (Overcommunicating versus undercommunicating, for instance.) But I think that one of the characteristics of genuinely successful, contributing, people, which I hope we all strive to be, is that they focus on their job and goals, rather than fall into the trap of gossiping about or being distracted by how others are getting ahead.
djillionsmix 13y ago
Sounds like Patty McCord's been following this guide to a T.
ilaksh 13y ago
I'm glad this guy is complaining because having a few people who are political or manipulative, especially if they are unproductive or incompetent, can kill projects or startups. And oftentimes those people are there and aren't recognized, or they have some slight competency but are manipulative and hurt the more productive team members. Obviously in the most elite teams this usually isn't an issue because people are too competent to admit or tolerate incompetence or the type of BS described in the article. But there are plenty of otherwise decent teams affected by this.
- jackbauer 13y ago
  +1 on this comment. We have someone like this. Slight competency and unproductive. His political manipulation (good competency there) damages the team's overall productivity and cohesion. Thankfully the people on top seem to have woken up to this - we are not in the US though, so no easy way to get rid of him.
notmyrealnick 13y ago
This is some terrific advice on how to hold on to a paying job while finding some time (and mindspace) to work on my startup idea -- great!
jilebedev 13y ago
Manipulative people succeed in life, and in business. Unfortunately, this is a skillset orthogonal to focuses of STEM majors: hence the drama generated by this post. As the Marines say: improvise, adapt, and overcome.
- deleted 13y ago
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- javert 13y ago
  If you consider the miserable schmuck who barely gets by in his job by playing games to be "successful in life," you're... well, you shouldn't. Find something you ENJOY doing with your time 40+ hours a week, and do THAT. That is the person who has won at life. What value does the cheater actually gain? Almost nothing. I mean, if that job is the only job he can possibly do to survive, and he is genuinely incapable of doing it properly (because doing it properly would, in practice, give him much more actual job security), he has gained a value... but that is a very false hypothetical.
  - cstavish 13y ago
    "Success" is such a nebulous term that it's silly to consider the manipulator who enjoys "gaming the system" to be less successful than a worker who enjoys being productive. To assume the person playing games is struggling to stay afloat is to misread the entire workplace environment that allows and rewards manipulating behavior.
  - stbtrax 13y ago
    It's pretty common for these 'cheaters' to become promoted and get positions with higher pay and power, while people that are technically competent but are not good at self-promotion don't and have to deal with being managed by these incompetent people.
  - jilebedev 13y ago
    On other discussion boards, I'd assume you were trolling. There is enough good faith on HN that I'll reply honestly. > miserable schmuck > barely gets by in his job People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above. A manipulative person is usually the director of sales. A manipulative person is someone who spends 20-30 hours in the office at the most, and the rest of it with his/her family or vacationing. You need to understand that manipulation of human beings isn't a character flaw, or something done for its own sake. It is done with a laser-focus on the results. Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy. People like "us" here on HN are cannon fodder for people who operate at this level. Manipulation, persuasion, sales, negotiation - people who excel at this eat people who "ENJOY" their 40hr jobs. I - I'm writing honestly here. It's difficult for me to believe you are not trolling. It's a very thin line for me to believe you are writing honestly here. > cheater actually gain? Almost nothing. The ability to demand a salary equivalent and easily surpassing that of a 20+ year engineer for ... the ability to sell things? Do you realize this human has no academic expertise whatsoever? They are PAID to manipulate and persuade. You can call that "cheating". You can find it detestable. You can cry about it in eloquent and persuasive language as you have attempted to do above. I sincerely do not mean this as an insult but: either you will adapt to the fact that 'success = manipulation' in life, or you will become one of the deluded schmucks in a dead end job because your skills with rails/js are obsolete in 20 years. The ability to manipulate people has infinite job security, and infinite earning potential. As the Marines say: adapt, and overcome.
trustfundbaby 13y ago
I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look. You have to remember if the person is thoroughly incompetent, none of this will work, but imagine if the person is actually pretty smart and good enough to get by, then make them personable and friendly ... and throw in a manager who doesn't really know shit about what you do ... then its a whole new ball game. In fact someone like this could wind up getting promoted over you into a "architect" role or some quasi-dev manager role (bosses who don't really know what developers do, love over communicators). I've seen it happen. Often times, they can gather a mob (depending on their social skills) and push out other engineers they don't like, or completely comandeer the engineering organization into ill-fated directions. What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.
- a3voices 13y ago
  The author seems to be blaming these employees too much, rather than the work environment. Perhaps they don't have enough incentives to be productive.
  - nordsieck 13y ago
    In my experience, productive people don't need an incentive to be productive - they like work. They just need people to get out of their way.
    - a3voices 13y ago
      Well that's certainly true, but for the other side of the bell curve I think the environment makes a difference.
      - trustfundbaby 13y ago
        I have to agree with you on this. The places I've seen people like this thrive are big-company-cya-all-the-time kinds of setups.
overgard 13y ago
What a fantastic article. I think the most frustrating thing about this kind of person isn't that they don't do work, but that they'll go out of their way to derail actual work with constant"questions" and "concerns", which always require various meetings, because they need to put their stamp on things. Why write a feature when you can spend a week talking about how to write it instead? Ugh. Bonus points in that now the engineers that are actually productive have to slow down to constantly explain/justify their work, making them look equally mediocre.
- coolrhymes 13y ago
  This! I mean, I don't what to say other than punch that person. I have had the first hand experience with this.
gallagher21 13y ago
This article is spot on, I've seen all of it play out in the office environment. I used to work with a guy who had little technical chops but managed to become a department manager through a series of such manipulations. When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work. Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage. I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority. Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology.
- woody99 13y ago
  I had a similar experience in a startup founded by ex-googlers.
Shenglong 13y ago
For me, what's frightening about this is how often I used to reflect on my own life, and at times, couldn't actually be sure whether I was useful or just overrated. People would tell me what a great job I did and praise the amount of time it must have taken, and while I'd smile nervously and modestly reject their attribution, I'd often be left silently thinking, "I don't think this was as difficult or took as long as you think it did." It took a while to just accept that I did my part. While there is danger in exaggeration, I also warn that there is arguably more danger in being too modest, and understating your own importance and value of your work. I've met extremely talented individuals who were being paid less than a third of what they deserved because they believed that their "work will speak for itself" or because they "don't believe in self-promotion". There is a healthy balance to be struck; remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self. There are better ways to do that than the ways listed here, though. For example, taking credit where credit is deserved is extremely useful, but ONLY when you're speaking to someone far removed, such as at a job interview. On a team, you'll get further by promoting and pushing through other peoples' accomplishments when they are too timid to do so. You'll earn respect from both parties, and you'll breed a more productive atmosphere which can only benefit you in the long term.
- allochthon 13y ago
  remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self. I agree that a little self-promotion is necessary in corporate America. But I find this to be due to a flaw in American character rather than a virtue. Self-promotion in any context apart from interviews is a little unbecoming in my opinion.
  - kops 13y ago
    AFAIK neither the problem, nor the solution is specific to America. Link bonus, salary or promotion to the amount of noise a guy makes and you can have an army of self-promoting assholes overnight anywhere in the world. The baby that cries the most, gets the milk etc. etc...
grownseed 13y ago
I worked with this guy for quite a while who I used to supervise as a developer, being a bit tired of his incompetence but seeing that he still had an interest in helping out, he and I suggested to my bosses that he be reassigned to a position that might fit his profile a bit better. Shortly after, the guy was made systems architect, without my prior knowledge (I was still in charge of devs). I pointed out that while a less hands-on position might be better suited, what he was doing clearly had nothing to do with being a systems architect (in no small part because I was the one taking care of that, if given the time). My bosses and said guy agreed and decided to make him a "business systems analyst". As of today I'm still not completely sure what that position entails. The basic idea, I was told, was that he would discuss and gather requirements from clients, then turn them into a useful set of documents and clear explanations. And this is where this article particularly hit the nail. Not once did this "business systems analyst" produce a valuable document. While he was attending meeting after meeting, going to conferences around the globe to supposedly learn about products he had literally no technical knowledge of, I wondered more and more what his value to the company might have been. He essentially created, with my bosses' blessing and encouragement, a whole confusing layer in the development process. He made a lot of noise, produced extremely confusing (and poorly written) documents turning basic client requirements into any developer's worst nightmare, readily passing the blame around without ever putting his position in the balance. Missed deadlines would be the PM's fault, an incorrect feature would be a developer's mistake, a misunderstood requirement would be the client's fault, and the list goes on. Each and every single project he touches simply becomes an absolute bane, but the amount of fuss generated through useless emails, delayed replies and inconsequential yet time-consuming nitpicking, has my bosses falling head over heels for him. Long story short, four valuable people (including myself) have left the company, and the guy is now "business systems director" (I did not make this up) and is on the board. This is both a sad and terrifying state of affairs...
- frozenport 13y ago
  I frequently hear this and have experienced it myself. The immediate solution is that this guy should have been sent to the sales department instead of given authority.
- sanderjd 13y ago
weixiyen 13y ago
I showed this Fedex commercial to my team as an example of what not to do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc I think the most important thing (just as important as hiring) as a manager is creating a culture of giving credit to others and deflecting credit from oneself. Let others speak for your work because if it's good, someone will say something (and if they don't you should bring it up in a 1:1), because that's the expectation and the culture. Once you do that, everything else takes care of itself in terms of department drama. People who are naturally well mannered will fit in perfectly and people who would have been problems in other environments understand that this is the type of behavior that's expected if they hope to progress, so they will follow suit. Besides that, correctly evaluating performance is important. For engineering managers, one thing I noticed is that code doesn't lie. It's the most objective metric you can use. All other metrics are subjective, and should be weighed less in comparison. If you have no way to easily look up someone's code contributions, it is nearly impossible to evaluate talent correctly. Still trying to figure things out but those are just some of the things I noticed.
shaih 13y ago
I actually came across some people like that, who where bossy and self promoting (didn't like them too much ). but if you combine it with hard work and true care for the business you might pull it off
AndrewWorsnop 13y ago
This is pretty much the selection criteria for "The Apprentice".
- walshemj 13y ago
  For the panel or the fantasists that appear on the show?
- finnw 13y ago
  Justified, because they are very amusing to watch.
AlexDanger 13y ago
>What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss. I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation. However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale. The key word is transparency. Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'. Here are some approaches that have worked for me: >Be Bossy and Critical This is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'. By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player! > Shamelessly Self Promote Line up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team. > Distract with Arguments about Minutiae Acknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort. > Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad) This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps. > Plan Excuses Ahead of Time I've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%. > Take Credit in Non-Disprovable Ways I dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV.
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michalu 13y ago
I wonder how should one behave if such person is your colleague or team member. The article concludes "don't be that guy" but that doesn't help if that guy is your colleague. Any thoughts from HN?
timrogers 13y ago
I found this article particularly amusing because I think we all see these behaviours in ourselves some of the time. The real trouble comes if you're working in this way most or even all the time.
JackMorgan 13y ago
I'd like to add another to the list: X) Point out massive, widespread architectural flaws, then kick off your boots till someone else fixes them. When asked to do something you don't like, point to that as a blocker. While useful to know the weaknesses of a system, the otherwise incredibly useful skill of being able to see such flaws can definitely be squandered if not used judiciously.
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Nicely written. I met way too many folks like that during my time at Google, it was very frustrating when someone would say "Oh be like so-an-so, he is very successful." and I would say "But he doesn't actually do anything." and they would say, but he is successful at it. :-) I don't know about the Slackware anecdote, in a similar situation if I was the manager I would just let them go. But that brings me to the real point of this, which is managing such people is pretty surreal. Especially if they are in full on misdirection mode. I suppose if you can get to some concrete deliverables for them, that they are not allowed to bother anyone else for, you can test their ability to complete some task or not.
mfrankel 13y ago
Covey would probably encourage you to understand the insecurities of these people and address them in a more positive way. Your mileage from his advice may vary. If you need a quick Covey review, take a 3 minute break and watch this: http://www.brevedy.com/7-habits-3-minutes-video/ http://www.brevedy.com/7-habits-3-minutes-video/
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edw519 13y ago
8. Protect your job: Write code that only you can maintain. Always have a "backlog" in dev that needs you to promote it. Cultivate customers who want only you. 9. Bring up the same fundamental company flaws every staff meeting. This is very easy to do because there are so many and they hardly ever get fixed. "Testing is broken because..." 10. Provide vivid postmortems of problems in meetings and emails. Again, this is so easy to do (and, oddly, greatly appreciated by management). 11. Block out tons of time in Outlook for "faux meetings". You must be important to be so hard to schedule. 12. Leave complex voice mail instructions: "If this is for ORP, contact Joe. If this is for Europe, ping me at...". Makes you look way more important than you really are. 13. Always have lots of complex diagrams on your white board. Change them often. 14. Always have lots of paper plastered to your wall. Change it often. 15. Publish & email explicit status reports often. Make it look like you're the only one who really knows what's going on. "I talked to Mary and she said we have to..." 16. Write & deploy lots of "generating" software that writes other software and runs cron jobs. Make sure your initials are perpetuated on logs everywhere. 17. Always walk quickly. Never have enough time to talk. "How's it going, John? Catch up with you later. Late for a meeting in dev..." (Bonus: always carry important looking papers/folder) 18. Always be on your cell phone. (Not texting or surfing; that make you look like a slacker. Always talking loudly and urgently: "No! The other log program!") 19. Always leave food on your desk. Only busy people never have time to finish what they're eating. 20. Always have treats to share with others. They may not realize it, but they'll probably never allow themselves to notice any of your possible apparent faults. 21. Get your name/initials on as many tickets and documents as possible, even those with only one line of code of just a quick comment on some little thing. People subconcisouly measure in quantity as much as quality. ("Wow, Ed's really been busy lately!") 22. Never use the words "but" or "can't". Put others down (thus elevating yourself) without offending them. 23. Always say things like "Yes, of course," "I am at your service," or "If you ever need help, let me know," You don't actually have to do anything. Just say that you will. People will remember it as if you actually did something. 24. Never chit chat in the break room, hallway, or social get-togethers. Don't accidently destroy your carefully cultivated "too busy" persona.
- woody99 13y ago
  I once saw a technical manager forced his team to use a poor language he developed to rewrite the company's product to secure his position. It's a few year ugly process. But it worked for him. His position is very secure now.
mlvljr 13y ago
Sounds like something coming right from the News Smasher :)
snorkel 13y ago
I've found that over time bullshitters who produce only noise are weeded out eventually, but there's also the opposite problem of actual producers stay so quiet that upper management has no idea who they are what they do, in which case it's good to demo your work to upper management whenever possible, even if not asked to, ask the top brass for time to show them something then give a quick demo explaining the business case of why that thing you created will change how the business operates for the better. This is especially joyful if you have a bullshit supervisor and you have to go around them to demo up, it makes clear to upper management that you create and maybe your supervisor just creates noise.
- woody99 13y ago
  It happened to me once but the upper management couldn't really care because it's a startup with no real business yet. Also, later I found that although the upper management criticise about X privately but claims their support to X in public. I guess that the upper management could not admit that they made such a mistake, the whole company would lose their faith if it's officially confirmed that they have been wasting time for years.
sramsay 13y ago
Anyone notice that this reads more-or-less like a description of Steve Jobs?
- badman_ting 13y ago
  Ha, no.
- jbeja 13y ago
  I don't even know the guy
jackbauer 13y ago
I work with someone like this and he has 6 out of 7 of these habits/attributes. No speculation. I completely agree with this article in terms of perceived vs actual productivity. Coupled with that are perceived super skills, but which are actually quite novice. Just another framework jockey. For the 7th, he is not an over-communicator - but has these hazy / fuzzy communications at stand up.
Tloewald 13y ago
This is a pretty insightful (and funny and depressing) article. That said, using these approaches can be quite dangerous because you can end up annoying someone with clout. A simpler and safer way to be overrated is simply to do the following: 1) Attend all meetings, ideally be slightly early OR slightly late (and apologetic) but not on-time. One creates the impression you're punctual and eager, the other that you're super busy and important -- so mix it up. If you're always early then you clearly have nothing to do. If you're always late then you're simply disorganized. 2) Reply to all emails within 30-60 minutes (NOT immediately because that increases the probability of an immediate reply). 30 minutes is plenty of time for the sender to get bored and work on something else, e.g. updating Facebook. Ideally if you're being asked to do something you should either request more information or somehow hand it off to a colleague (or, if it's really easy, just do it -- unless you actually enjoy screwing with people). This will create the impression that you are totally on top of things and never the bottleneck. 3) There's no third thing. You're done. You can now rise to the top of virtually any organization. Obviously, it helps to have some clue as to what's going on (e.g. what project you're on and what your role is supposed to be -- your emails should at least make sense in context). All the other stuff mentioned in the article is great if it works, but potentially lethal if you screw the wrong person. E.g. claiming credit may work great in the short term, but it will make you enemies. Remember, some people in the organization may give a damn or know something. Why take the risk? Just show up to meetings and answer emails. People will assign you credit for modesty if nothing else. I might add that if you do this stuff, and -- if only to avoid boredom -- pay some attention during meetings, actually read the emails you respond to, and try to be reasonable when you say or write something, you'll actually be a way-above-average contributor to many bureaucracies.
- mateo411 13y ago
  This is good advice, from a straight shooter who has upper management written all over him.
  - Tloewald 13y ago
    Ouch!
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mathattack 13y ago
Funny article, but don't people see through this very quickly? Folks that don't play well with others get found out very quickly.
- michaelochurch 13y ago
  The trick is to be subtle and nice while doing it, especially around important people. You're not coming off as bossy but over-helpful. You're not being critical to be mean, but you're sharing your expertise and giving advice about the right way to do things. You always pick a level where you're aggressive enough that people move around you as you wish, but not so much as to cause issues. OP's advice (and if you get to the end, he points out that this will not work except in a dysfunctional environment) is great for people who are looking to inject themselves into power vacuums. If the boss is never there and you start asking for status reports, people start treating you as if you were the boss-- and being passively deferential in the hope that you'll go away and let them get back to work-- and soon enough you've made yourself #2. Then you just need to get the real boss promoted or demoted or fired or disinterested enough to vacate.
falsedan 13y ago
How do management not spot these behaviours? I've worked at places where habits would be a sure-fire recipe for a stellar performance review--heck, some line managers even suggested that I adopt a couple!
creade 13y ago
I'd heartily recommend the book version of The Peter Principle. A lot of people are probably familiar with its namesake principle, but the book goes into a lot more detail about what the implications of it are and wider concepts of useless and destructive employee patterns.
WalterSear 13y ago
People who behave this way are generally too self-absorbed to realize that they are behaving this way.
rajanikanthr 13y ago
OMG..damn accurate as I experienced the same by one of the teammate.But as a contract employee I can't do much
nsxwolf 13y ago
This article is a great Impostor Syndrome trigger.
- aclevernickname 13y ago
  Thanks for making me look up [1] that term. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
- shuaib 13y ago
  This is exactly what I was thinking. How does one go about deciding whether he has impostor syndrome or is highly overrated because of his "7 habits"?
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krmmalik 13y ago
Having made some poor choices and ending up with overrated people for the last several years over and over; I narrowed it down to two things. 1. Ego - Low Self Esteem and Narcisstic behaviour 2. Finding excuses not to get things done.
adamconroy 13y ago
There is a fine line. Sometimes these habits are required to fend off being underrated. I've been on projects where the attempts to make people look bad are brutal and relentless. Another scenario I experienced was where I took a contract at a company where my cousin is CIO. It wasn't pleasant, there was a constant assumption that I was just there through nepotism, and that I was overrated.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
> 4. Distract with Arguments about Minutiae Aka, pg's "middlebrow dismisal".
shuaib 13y ago
Well put. But I think this is only half the picture. What happens when you do NOT have these habits, and are on the verge of being labelled the most incompetent/lazy team member, even though it might be you doing the actual work. Won't such a person, seeing that his work isn't being appreciated, get down to actually following these habits to be appreciated?
sidcool 13y ago
You know, you are right, this all seems wrong on paper. But that fact remains that it works. It works in impressing your boss and others. It helps in promotion. It's like marketing. I don't believe in doing so personally, because I lack this skill. But I am working on developing it.

466 points by edandersen 13y ago

If Moses was the most modest man in the world; would he even make a statement claiming he was the most modest man in the world? I can handle a little self promotion, but it's always from the wrong guy. Too many of those wrong guys had wealthy fathers who financed every thing. I guess in order to get laid, or promoted they need to let people know what "talents" they have? Some of you computer guru's are the worst offenders.

fragsworth 13y ago

The author starts by claiming he was surprised that he couldn't come up with positive things about a coworker, but then goes on to describe a list of grievances about someone who was clearly intolerable. He even mentions this later: > If you’re currently doing them, stop. I’m not saying this because you’ll be insufferable (though you will be) His initial "mistaken" judgment ("how did I get this so wrong? Am I just an idiot?") of the person in question just doesn't seem genuine in retrospect.

jschmitz28 13y ago
I read that as him starting to truly pay attention and notice these behaviors in other people after the original guy had left (and not in the original guy himself).
zainny 13y ago
Honestly I don't think any part of the question is genuine. It's all basically a setup for complaining about his coworkers.

001sky 13y ago

A follow up post on resume/interviewing would be equally illuminating. Every organization needs its team players and people who are 'useful' rather than merely 'pruducutive' in the sense of objective talent. But the bozo-factor is more what this essay is getting at, and it seems for the most part these are the folks best left in place at their current gigs.

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codeonfire 13y ago

I could write a book on these types of tactics. For instance, in a meeting that involves your boss, command your coworkers to do what they were all already going to do. "Commit that change and send out an email describing what you changed." They can't not do their job, so it appears to your boss that everyone else is taking orders from you. If someone challenges you, passive-aggressively suggest a time they can get help from you.

ExpiredLink 13y ago
I have seen this, too. But all those tactics can and will backfire. Soon the 'overrated' will be cut off from information and support.
krisgee 13y ago
>I could write a book on these types of tactics. It's called the 48 laws of power. Specifically your example is Rules 6,7 and arguably 34.

ritchiea 13y ago

How does this kind of stuff get voted up? He's clever, but ultimately just doing a lot of complaining about his co-workers.

Aynatix 13y ago
I agree.
perlpimp 13y ago
what is being said closely resembles corporate/government structure and it's people (successful) ones at least by my experience. Mostly doing fiercely mediocre job and doing the social part they advance themselves for sole benefit of themselves. Where this goes against the grain of hn community is that people who gather here are self starter types and have started or looking up to who did start their own gig to avoid being in the same environment where people like that strive - corporate ladder climbers etc..
Ma8ee 13y ago
Because it helps us see patterns that we might not be aware of otherwise.

auctiontheory 13y ago

Some of these habits may indeed be true of overrated people, although some may just be true of successful people. (Overcommunicating versus undercommunicating, for instance.) But I think that one of the characteristics of genuinely successful, contributing, people, which I hope we all strive to be, is that they focus on their job and goals, rather than fall into the trap of gossiping about or being distracted by how others are getting ahead.

djillionsmix 13y ago

Sounds like Patty McCord's been following this guide to a T.

ilaksh 13y ago

I'm glad this guy is complaining because having a few people who are political or manipulative, especially if they are unproductive or incompetent, can kill projects or startups. And oftentimes those people are there and aren't recognized, or they have some slight competency but are manipulative and hurt the more productive team members. Obviously in the most elite teams this usually isn't an issue because people are too competent to admit or tolerate incompetence or the type of BS described in the article. But there are plenty of otherwise decent teams affected by this.

jackbauer 13y ago
+1 on this comment. We have someone like this. Slight competency and unproductive. His political manipulation (good competency there) damages the team's overall productivity and cohesion. Thankfully the people on top seem to have woken up to this - we are not in the US though, so no easy way to get rid of him.

notmyrealnick 13y ago

This is some terrific advice on how to hold on to a paying job while finding some time (and mindspace) to work on my startup idea -- great!

jilebedev 13y ago

Manipulative people succeed in life, and in business. Unfortunately, this is a skillset orthogonal to focuses of STEM majors: hence the drama generated by this post. As the Marines say: improvise, adapt, and overcome.

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javert 13y ago
If you consider the miserable schmuck who barely gets by in his job by playing games to be "successful in life," you're... well, you shouldn't. Find something you ENJOY doing with your time 40+ hours a week, and do THAT. That is the person who has won at life. What value does the cheater actually gain? Almost nothing. I mean, if that job is the only job he can possibly do to survive, and he is genuinely incapable of doing it properly (because doing it properly would, in practice, give him much more actual job security), he has gained a value... but that is a very false hypothetical.
- cstavish 13y ago
  "Success" is such a nebulous term that it's silly to consider the manipulator who enjoys "gaming the system" to be less successful than a worker who enjoys being productive. To assume the person playing games is struggling to stay afloat is to misread the entire workplace environment that allows and rewards manipulating behavior.
- stbtrax 13y ago
  It's pretty common for these 'cheaters' to become promoted and get positions with higher pay and power, while people that are technically competent but are not good at self-promotion don't and have to deal with being managed by these incompetent people.
- jilebedev 13y ago
  On other discussion boards, I'd assume you were trolling. There is enough good faith on HN that I'll reply honestly. > miserable schmuck > barely gets by in his job People who are miserable schmucks barely getting by in their jobs are the very antithesis of the manipulative human I described above. A manipulative person is usually the director of sales. A manipulative person is someone who spends 20-30 hours in the office at the most, and the rest of it with his/her family or vacationing. You need to understand that manipulation of human beings isn't a character flaw, or something done for its own sake. It is done with a laser-focus on the results. Either you have manipulated the dev/ops team to work unreasonable hours to meet a promise to a major client that will net you alone a 20k benefit at the end of the month or ... you are going to be "just" the sales guy. People like "us" here on HN are cannon fodder for people who operate at this level. Manipulation, persuasion, sales, negotiation - people who excel at this eat people who "ENJOY" their 40hr jobs. I - I'm writing honestly here. It's difficult for me to believe you are not trolling. It's a very thin line for me to believe you are writing honestly here. > cheater actually gain? Almost nothing. The ability to demand a salary equivalent and easily surpassing that of a 20+ year engineer for ... the ability to sell things? Do you realize this human has no academic expertise whatsoever? They are PAID to manipulate and persuade. You can call that "cheating". You can find it detestable. You can cry about it in eloquent and persuasive language as you have attempted to do above. I sincerely do not mean this as an insult but: either you will adapt to the fact that 'success = manipulation' in life, or you will become one of the deluded schmucks in a dead end job because your skills with rails/js are obsolete in 20 years. The ability to manipulate people has infinite job security, and infinite earning potential. As the Marines say: adapt, and overcome.

trustfundbaby 13y ago

I would laugh, but I've seen this up close and personal and people like this are more dangerous than they might look. You have to remember if the person is thoroughly incompetent, none of this will work, but imagine if the person is actually pretty smart and good enough to get by, then make them personable and friendly ... and throw in a manager who doesn't really know shit about what you do ... then its a whole new ball game. In fact someone like this could wind up getting promoted over you into a "architect" role or some quasi-dev manager role (bosses who don't really know what developers do, love over communicators). I've seen it happen. Often times, they can gather a mob (depending on their social skills) and push out other engineers they don't like, or completely comandeer the engineering organization into ill-fated directions. What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss.

a3voices 13y ago
The author seems to be blaming these employees too much, rather than the work environment. Perhaps they don't have enough incentives to be productive.
- nordsieck 13y ago
  In my experience, productive people don't need an incentive to be productive - they like work. They just need people to get out of their way.
  - a3voices 13y ago
    Well that's certainly true, but for the other side of the bell curve I think the environment makes a difference.
    - trustfundbaby 13y ago
      I have to agree with you on this. The places I've seen people like this thrive are big-company-cya-all-the-time kinds of setups.

overgard 13y ago

What a fantastic article. I think the most frustrating thing about this kind of person isn't that they don't do work, but that they'll go out of their way to derail actual work with constant"questions" and "concerns", which always require various meetings, because they need to put their stamp on things. Why write a feature when you can spend a week talking about how to write it instead? Ugh. Bonus points in that now the engineers that are actually productive have to slow down to constantly explain/justify their work, making them look equally mediocre.

coolrhymes 13y ago
This! I mean, I don't what to say other than punch that person. I have had the first hand experience with this.

gallagher21 13y ago

This article is spot on, I've seen all of it play out in the office environment. I used to work with a guy who had little technical chops but managed to become a department manager through a series of such manipulations. When he first started out as a dev, he would endlessly call useless meetings where he would talk for hours on end about marginal and tangentially relevant things and try to project authority by looking important by hijacking these meetings. No one could tell him to stop calling these meetings because no one wanted to look like they were avoiding work. Then the upper management mistook his behavior for proactivness and competence and he got promoted to a "tech lead". That made the situation worse because not only did he not back down, but he progressively got even more aggressive and would actively micromanage and derail technical decisions made by the architect simply to exercise authority and to let people know that he was THE decision maker there. Everything he did was based on scoring social points and not doing the thing that had the most merit. Furthermore, he would often have these arguments with people in front of the entire office in a very loud/aggressive tone, which made a lot of people reluctant to disagree, because honestly, what normal person wants to have a huge argument in front of the entire cube farm. He knew this very well and used it to his advantage. I remember a number of occasions where he would actively overrule other's (very sound) technical decisions with his half baked nonfunctional crap simply to be "right" and to make other people "wrong". Again, all to score points and buy even more authority. Long story short, he has done a lot of damage and made a number of people quit because of stress and humiliation. He is now one of the higher ups in the company. Mind you, this is a very corrupt old-school company I'm talking about and is barely staying afloat these days. People like this get found out and filtered out very fast in smaller companies run by hackers instead of old socipathic farts with no understanding of technology.

woody99 13y ago
I had a similar experience in a startup founded by ex-googlers.

Shenglong 13y ago

For me, what's frightening about this is how often I used to reflect on my own life, and at times, couldn't actually be sure whether I was useful or just overrated. People would tell me what a great job I did and praise the amount of time it must have taken, and while I'd smile nervously and modestly reject their attribution, I'd often be left silently thinking, "I don't think this was as difficult or took as long as you think it did." It took a while to just accept that I did my part. While there is danger in exaggeration, I also warn that there is arguably more danger in being too modest, and understating your own importance and value of your work. I've met extremely talented individuals who were being paid less than a third of what they deserved because they believed that their "work will speak for itself" or because they "don't believe in self-promotion". There is a healthy balance to be struck; remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self. There are better ways to do that than the ways listed here, though. For example, taking credit where credit is deserved is extremely useful, but ONLY when you're speaking to someone far removed, such as at a job interview. On a team, you'll get further by promoting and pushing through other peoples' accomplishments when they are too timid to do so. You'll earn respect from both parties, and you'll breed a more productive atmosphere which can only benefit you in the long term.

allochthon 13y ago
remember that just as marketing is essential to a successful product, promotion is important for the self. I agree that a little self-promotion is necessary in corporate America. But I find this to be due to a flaw in American character rather than a virtue. Self-promotion in any context apart from interviews is a little unbecoming in my opinion.
- kops 13y ago
  AFAIK neither the problem, nor the solution is specific to America. Link bonus, salary or promotion to the amount of noise a guy makes and you can have an army of self-promoting assholes overnight anywhere in the world. The baby that cries the most, gets the milk etc. etc...

grownseed 13y ago

I worked with this guy for quite a while who I used to supervise as a developer, being a bit tired of his incompetence but seeing that he still had an interest in helping out, he and I suggested to my bosses that he be reassigned to a position that might fit his profile a bit better. Shortly after, the guy was made systems architect, without my prior knowledge (I was still in charge of devs). I pointed out that while a less hands-on position might be better suited, what he was doing clearly had nothing to do with being a systems architect (in no small part because I was the one taking care of that, if given the time). My bosses and said guy agreed and decided to make him a "business systems analyst". As of today I'm still not completely sure what that position entails. The basic idea, I was told, was that he would discuss and gather requirements from clients, then turn them into a useful set of documents and clear explanations. And this is where this article particularly hit the nail. Not once did this "business systems analyst" produce a valuable document. While he was attending meeting after meeting, going to conferences around the globe to supposedly learn about products he had literally no technical knowledge of, I wondered more and more what his value to the company might have been. He essentially created, with my bosses' blessing and encouragement, a whole confusing layer in the development process. He made a lot of noise, produced extremely confusing (and poorly written) documents turning basic client requirements into any developer's worst nightmare, readily passing the blame around without ever putting his position in the balance. Missed deadlines would be the PM's fault, an incorrect feature would be a developer's mistake, a misunderstood requirement would be the client's fault, and the list goes on. Each and every single project he touches simply becomes an absolute bane, but the amount of fuss generated through useless emails, delayed replies and inconsequential yet time-consuming nitpicking, has my bosses falling head over heels for him. Long story short, four valuable people (including myself) have left the company, and the guy is now "business systems director" (I did not make this up) and is on the board. This is both a sad and terrifying state of affairs...

frozenport 13y ago
I frequently hear this and have experienced it myself. The immediate solution is that this guy should have been sent to the sales department instead of given authority.
sanderjd 13y ago

weixiyen 13y ago

I showed this Fedex commercial to my team as an example of what not to do: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNCrMEOqHpc I think the most important thing (just as important as hiring) as a manager is creating a culture of giving credit to others and deflecting credit from oneself. Let others speak for your work because if it's good, someone will say something (and if they don't you should bring it up in a 1:1), because that's the expectation and the culture. Once you do that, everything else takes care of itself in terms of department drama. People who are naturally well mannered will fit in perfectly and people who would have been problems in other environments understand that this is the type of behavior that's expected if they hope to progress, so they will follow suit. Besides that, correctly evaluating performance is important. For engineering managers, one thing I noticed is that code doesn't lie. It's the most objective metric you can use. All other metrics are subjective, and should be weighed less in comparison. If you have no way to easily look up someone's code contributions, it is nearly impossible to evaluate talent correctly. Still trying to figure things out but those are just some of the things I noticed.

shaih 13y ago

I actually came across some people like that, who where bossy and self promoting (didn't like them too much ). but if you combine it with hard work and true care for the business you might pull it off

AndrewWorsnop 13y ago

This is pretty much the selection criteria for "The Apprentice".

walshemj 13y ago
For the panel or the fantasists that appear on the show?
finnw 13y ago
Justified, because they are very amusing to watch.

AlexDanger 13y ago

>What I'd like to hear from the OP is ways to counteract this kind of behavior, I suspect there might not be a way to do it if you're a peer, only if you're that person's boss. I think the article misses an important point - never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by ignorance (Hanlon's Razor). Many of these behaviours are not malicious, but are borne out of lack of experience, fear of failure, shyness or just plain misunderstanding. As a peer, you can certainly assist with these issues. It should always be your first assumption when appraoching the situation. However, if you are dealing with a verified malicious/manipulative/lazy person I think its management's responsibility to do something about these behaviours. As a peer I think you can be proactive to expose some of these behaviours and the impact they have on productivity and team morale. The key word is transparency. Transparency to these people is like sunlight to a vampire. They will do anything to avoid it. The tightrope act is highlighting these problematic behaviours to management or other peers without being a dick about it. A key part of this is challenging the behaviour rather than the person. Tackle issues as if they are shared problems you need to solve rather than 'you versus me'. Here are some approaches that have worked for me: >Be Bossy and Critical This is easy. If someone tries to palm off their work to me, or give I simply ask them to run it past management first as it may impact the deadline for other tasks. 90% of the time they never ask. The 'Oh my god, whats up with the reports? Am I going to have to do this myself??' attack is even easier to handle if you can exercise a bit of self-control and avoid getting defensive. Just reply via email (and CC the project manager) 'Yes, thankyou for offering! I'm snowed under with my allocated tasks so we'll have a better result if you're able to finish these reports'. By thanking them for their generous offer, you turn the whole situation on its head. What a team player! > Shamelessly Self Promote Line up the self-promoted activities with the goals of the project. If they match, well, thats ok. If they dont, ask how we as a team can ensure we hit our deadlines. Remember that we're all a team, and we all (management included) want to hit our deadlines. As a team, will we have to cut back on any low priority tasks? What should the team be prioritising? Team Team Team. > Distract with Arguments about Minutiae Acknowledge the minutiae, do not dismiss it. Then ask how they see this impacting the project deliverables. Remember with project teams (and particularly software teams) each individual is focussed on their part of the puzzle....and that small piece becomes their whole world. I dont see this behaviour as malicious. Just a side effect of the tunnel vision required for difficult programming tasks. It helps to 'come up for air' every now and then and see the big picture. That puts these minutiae issues into perspective. Ask them to raise it as a discussion item post-deadline. Share your own little minutiae problem and how much it annoys you, but describe how you live with it because ultimately there are more important things to worry about. In my experience, this minutiae thing is not about laziness, its about team empathy and acknowledgement of effort. > Time It So You Look Good (Or Everyone Else Looks Bad) This is one of my pet hates. I work with an international team and some people really abuse the time difference with this scam. When two people on the opposite sides of the globe do this, its a thing of beauty. 4 days of non-work to restore a SQL .bak file. To be honest I dont know how to deal with this aside from daily progress reports which expose how little work is getting done. Explicity stating 'if you encounter a problem that stops you, just put it aside as we dont have the time to lose' sometimes helps. > Plan Excuses Ahead of Time I've noticed that sometimes this is not about excuses, its about a lack of confidence. Perhaps bad time syncing in linux can cause big problems? Who knows? Many people are scared of breaking things they do not understand. This is a reasonable attitude. Just need to encourage pro-active thinking. Ask them what they did instead? Perhaps set up a couple of VMs that people can play with and not worry about breaking? We've had alot of success with this approach. We had a support team who couldnt solve any customer tickets because they were terrified of 'messing with the system' and hadnt received proper training. After a couple of months active encouragement, a no-blame approach to problems, and a few short training sessions focussing on how to diagnose issues rather than following a script....they became incredibly effective. Now they'll jump right in, have a go, if they cant fix it, they'll describe what they did and where they got stuck. Ticket turnaround time dropped by about 75%. > Take Credit in Non-Disprovable Ways I dont really know how to handle this. It used to worry me but I dont really care any more. I've had the most indivual success when I remain team focussed instead of expending mental energy worrying about my personal brand. Granted, I now work in a large organisation. I've seen this behaviour in a small company (ie a manager/owner 'king of the castle' egomaniac) and it was terminal. Time to polish up the CV.

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michalu 13y ago

I wonder how should one behave if such person is your colleague or team member. The article concludes "don't be that guy" but that doesn't help if that guy is your colleague. Any thoughts from HN?

timrogers 13y ago

I found this article particularly amusing because I think we all see these behaviours in ourselves some of the time. The real trouble comes if you're working in this way most or even all the time.

JackMorgan 13y ago

I'd like to add another to the list: X) Point out massive, widespread architectural flaws, then kick off your boots till someone else fixes them. When asked to do something you don't like, point to that as a blocker. While useful to know the weaknesses of a system, the otherwise incredibly useful skill of being able to see such flaws can definitely be squandered if not used judiciously.

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Nicely written. I met way too many folks like that during my time at Google, it was very frustrating when someone would say "Oh be like so-an-so, he is very successful." and I would say "But he doesn't actually do anything." and they would say, but he is successful at it. :-) I don't know about the Slackware anecdote, in a similar situation if I was the manager I would just let them go. But that brings me to the real point of this, which is managing such people is pretty surreal. Especially if they are in full on misdirection mode. I suppose if you can get to some concrete deliverables for them, that they are not allowed to bother anyone else for, you can test their ability to complete some task or not.

mfrankel 13y ago

Covey would probably encourage you to understand the insecurities of these people and address them in a more positive way. Your mileage from his advice may vary. If you need a quick Covey review, take a 3 minute break and watch this: http://www.brevedy.com/7-habits-3-minutes-video/ http://www.brevedy.com/7-habits-3-minutes-video/

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edw519 13y ago

8. Protect your job: Write code that only you can maintain. Always have a "backlog" in dev that needs you to promote it. Cultivate customers who want only you. 9. Bring up the same fundamental company flaws every staff meeting. This is very easy to do because there are so many and they hardly ever get fixed. "Testing is broken because..." 10. Provide vivid postmortems of problems in meetings and emails. Again, this is so easy to do (and, oddly, greatly appreciated by management). 11. Block out tons of time in Outlook for "faux meetings". You must be important to be so hard to schedule. 12. Leave complex voice mail instructions: "If this is for ORP, contact Joe. If this is for Europe, ping me at...". Makes you look way more important than you really are. 13. Always have lots of complex diagrams on your white board. Change them often. 14. Always have lots of paper plastered to your wall. Change it often. 15. Publish & email explicit status reports often. Make it look like you're the only one who really knows what's going on. "I talked to Mary and she said we have to..." 16. Write & deploy lots of "generating" software that writes other software and runs cron jobs. Make sure your initials are perpetuated on logs everywhere. 17. Always walk quickly. Never have enough time to talk. "How's it going, John? Catch up with you later. Late for a meeting in dev..." (Bonus: always carry important looking papers/folder) 18. Always be on your cell phone. (Not texting or surfing; that make you look like a slacker. Always talking loudly and urgently: "No! The other log program!") 19. Always leave food on your desk. Only busy people never have time to finish what they're eating. 20. Always have treats to share with others. They may not realize it, but they'll probably never allow themselves to notice any of your possible apparent faults. 21. Get your name/initials on as many tickets and documents as possible, even those with only one line of code of just a quick comment on some little thing. People subconcisouly measure in quantity as much as quality. ("Wow, Ed's really been busy lately!") 22. Never use the words "but" or "can't". Put others down (thus elevating yourself) without offending them. 23. Always say things like "Yes, of course," "I am at your service," or "If you ever need help, let me know," You don't actually have to do anything. Just say that you will. People will remember it as if you actually did something. 24. Never chit chat in the break room, hallway, or social get-togethers. Don't accidently destroy your carefully cultivated "too busy" persona.

woody99 13y ago
I once saw a technical manager forced his team to use a poor language he developed to rewrite the company's product to secure his position. It's a few year ugly process. But it worked for him. His position is very secure now.

mlvljr 13y ago

Sounds like something coming right from the News Smasher :)

snorkel 13y ago

I've found that over time bullshitters who produce only noise are weeded out eventually, but there's also the opposite problem of actual producers stay so quiet that upper management has no idea who they are what they do, in which case it's good to demo your work to upper management whenever possible, even if not asked to, ask the top brass for time to show them something then give a quick demo explaining the business case of why that thing you created will change how the business operates for the better. This is especially joyful if you have a bullshit supervisor and you have to go around them to demo up, it makes clear to upper management that you create and maybe your supervisor just creates noise.

woody99 13y ago
It happened to me once but the upper management couldn't really care because it's a startup with no real business yet. Also, later I found that although the upper management criticise about X privately but claims their support to X in public. I guess that the upper management could not admit that they made such a mistake, the whole company would lose their faith if it's officially confirmed that they have been wasting time for years.

sramsay 13y ago

Anyone notice that this reads more-or-less like a description of Steve Jobs?

badman_ting 13y ago
Ha, no.
jbeja 13y ago
I don't even know the guy

jackbauer 13y ago

I work with someone like this and he has 6 out of 7 of these habits/attributes. No speculation. I completely agree with this article in terms of perceived vs actual productivity. Coupled with that are perceived super skills, but which are actually quite novice. Just another framework jockey. For the 7th, he is not an over-communicator - but has these hazy / fuzzy communications at stand up.

Tloewald 13y ago

This is a pretty insightful (and funny and depressing) article. That said, using these approaches can be quite dangerous because you can end up annoying someone with clout. A simpler and safer way to be overrated is simply to do the following: 1) Attend all meetings, ideally be slightly early OR slightly late (and apologetic) but not on-time. One creates the impression you're punctual and eager, the other that you're super busy and important -- so mix it up. If you're always early then you clearly have nothing to do. If you're always late then you're simply disorganized. 2) Reply to all emails within 30-60 minutes (NOT immediately because that increases the probability of an immediate reply). 30 minutes is plenty of time for the sender to get bored and work on something else, e.g. updating Facebook. Ideally if you're being asked to do something you should either request more information or somehow hand it off to a colleague (or, if it's really easy, just do it -- unless you actually enjoy screwing with people). This will create the impression that you are totally on top of things and never the bottleneck. 3) There's no third thing. You're done. You can now rise to the top of virtually any organization. Obviously, it helps to have some clue as to what's going on (e.g. what project you're on and what your role is supposed to be -- your emails should at least make sense in context). All the other stuff mentioned in the article is great if it works, but potentially lethal if you screw the wrong person. E.g. claiming credit may work great in the short term, but it will make you enemies. Remember, some people in the organization may give a damn or know something. Why take the risk? Just show up to meetings and answer emails. People will assign you credit for modesty if nothing else. I might add that if you do this stuff, and -- if only to avoid boredom -- pay some attention during meetings, actually read the emails you respond to, and try to be reasonable when you say or write something, you'll actually be a way-above-average contributor to many bureaucracies.

mateo411 13y ago
This is good advice, from a straight shooter who has upper management written all over him.
- Tloewald 13y ago
  Ouch!

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mathattack 13y ago

Funny article, but don't people see through this very quickly? Folks that don't play well with others get found out very quickly.

michaelochurch 13y ago
The trick is to be subtle and nice while doing it, especially around important people. You're not coming off as bossy but over-helpful. You're not being critical to be mean, but you're sharing your expertise and giving advice about the right way to do things. You always pick a level where you're aggressive enough that people move around you as you wish, but not so much as to cause issues. OP's advice (and if you get to the end, he points out that this will not work except in a dysfunctional environment) is great for people who are looking to inject themselves into power vacuums. If the boss is never there and you start asking for status reports, people start treating you as if you were the boss-- and being passively deferential in the hope that you'll go away and let them get back to work-- and soon enough you've made yourself #2. Then you just need to get the real boss promoted or demoted or fired or disinterested enough to vacate.

falsedan 13y ago

How do management not spot these behaviours? I've worked at places where habits would be a sure-fire recipe for a stellar performance review--heck, some line managers even suggested that I adopt a couple!

creade 13y ago

I'd heartily recommend the book version of The Peter Principle. A lot of people are probably familiar with its namesake principle, but the book goes into a lot more detail about what the implications of it are and wider concepts of useless and destructive employee patterns.

WalterSear 13y ago

People who behave this way are generally too self-absorbed to realize that they are behaving this way.

rajanikanthr 13y ago

OMG..damn accurate as I experienced the same by one of the teammate.But as a contract employee I can't do much

nsxwolf 13y ago

This article is a great Impostor Syndrome trigger.

aclevernickname 13y ago
Thanks for making me look up [1] that term. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impostor_syndrome
shuaib 13y ago
This is exactly what I was thinking. How does one go about deciding whether he has impostor syndrome or is highly overrated because of his "7 habits"?

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krmmalik 13y ago

Having made some poor choices and ending up with overrated people for the last several years over and over; I narrowed it down to two things. 1. Ego - Low Self Esteem and Narcisstic behaviour 2. Finding excuses not to get things done.

adamconroy 13y ago

There is a fine line. Sometimes these habits are required to fend off being underrated. I've been on projects where the attempts to make people look bad are brutal and relentless. Another scenario I experienced was where I took a contract at a company where my cousin is CIO. It wasn't pleasant, there was a constant assumption that I was just there through nepotism, and that I was overrated.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

> 4. Distract with Arguments about Minutiae Aka, pg's "middlebrow dismisal".

shuaib 13y ago

Well put. But I think this is only half the picture. What happens when you do NOT have these habits, and are on the verge of being labelled the most incompetent/lazy team member, even though it might be you doing the actual work. Won't such a person, seeing that his work isn't being appreciated, get down to actually following these habits to be appreciated?

sidcool 13y ago

You know, you are right, this all seems wrong on paper. But that fact remains that it works. It works in impressing your boss and others. It helps in promotion. It's like marketing. I don't believe in doing so personally, because I lack this skill. But I am working on developing it.