I wish I had written this. If the humor/cynicism gets to you please power through and look at the actionable tips which will earn you more money.
There is approximately no-one on HN, not even at the best managed firms with the least BS imaginable, who would not experience positive ROI from "Congrats guys, we just shipped X, let's have a celebratory dinner at $FAVORITE and I'm buying." That idea is freaking genius. It gets you instant political capital and will make sure decisionmakers actually remember X the next time it rolls around because they'll have a hundred projects to worry about but only one or two which were so important they had celebratory dinners at completion.
Wow. I didn't realize there is actually peer pressure in IT companies not to use knowledge of social relationships and human nature for your own benefit. In my opinion, the general unwillingness of computer workers to stand up for their own rights and interests is keeping our entire profession back from getting the money and respect it deserves. If we actively sabotage efforts of people who are trying to improve things, I don't see that there is much hope. Being nerds does not have to imply being clueless nerds.
A lot of IT people just want an easy life - doing what they [used to] love, and gradually progress up the chain based on their skills and experience. People who take short-cuts like this probably don't care about the work, their focus is manipulating their way up the organisation.
In my experience this isn't really true. People are perfectly capable of being ambitious, enjoying their work, and wanting to make a big impact. And there's definitely a positive correlation between social skills and impact.
When you phrase it that way, of course it sounds useless.
Have you ever gone out to a bar and bought a round of drinks for your friends? Yes, that's like $90 a round for 10 people in a New York bar. But I bet you got a drink back from every one of those people some day (and if you didn't, they're not great friends or you make a lot more money than them).
It's kind of the same principle here. It doesn't have to be a steak dinner for 20 people - I know I can't afford that. But if you go out for wings and beer, buy around of beers. If you don't want to do that, go to the local bakery and bring in two dozen bagels and cream cheese. The point isn't how much you spend to be impress everyone, the point is to do something other than just show up and mooch.
Patrick said "Buy your team dinner". That's what I was referring to. Buying a round of drinks is a very different thing, IMO. It's perfectly natural and social behaviour in many cultures.
To be fair to the author of the original article, he suggests buying a round at the pub, which isn't quite on the same scale as buying dinner out for everyone. In the UK that would only be appropriate if you were the manager of the team in question & you had reached a significant milestone in development IMO.
Reciprocal buying of rounds on the other hand is standard issue UK social lubricant. Using "We shipped, yay!" as an excuse to make your's the next round would be exactly the right thing to do.
Exactly , but if your working in a large non IT business you have the problem of getting people who are not in the IT dept to show up at the pub. Especially the movers and shakers.
There's a social dance going on here: You mention drinks to the appropriate people, knowing that some of them won't come but they'll remember the invitation positively.
That is a detail needing cultural adjustment, but the concept is universal.
For example, here in Israel most high-tech jobs include ZeroCater-esque food plans, so (without significant spending) buying food for your team would probably result in a worse meal for everyone. However, buying your team snacks and drinks on special events was standard practice at my last job.
Larger events can be harder to coordinate, but I've often used food in various ways at work. Usually, bringing in a cake or something like that to celebrate something, and often something small ("hey, the build server works!" or "hey, 3 people had a birthday in December!")
It can certainly be overdone, but can also make you memorable to people. I brought cookies and milk (for up to, say, 6 people) to a job interview 7 years ago. The day I did, it happened to be the company owner's birthday, which was quite a coincidence. The owner called me up a few weeks ago asking if I was available for some work.
He remembered me all those years later because of the $7 I spent before a job interview. Not because of the paper my resume was on, or how cleverly it was worded, or the color of the tie I wore, or what I drove, or what my code looked like, or how I used vim instead of emacs, or what certifications I had, or what color my hair was.
Broken in what sense? That "programming ability" is not the only criteria selected for?
In this case, and in most interview cases, there's already been some vetting done via resume/portfolio/phone, and face to face interviews are as much about personality and team fit as they are about technical competence. Being able to demonstrate that you can think about others socially, include them in to a small ritual, and do it in a way that's memorable without coming across as too cheesy (I don't think I did) is... dare I say, a skill.
I've definitely been on the interviewer side of the table, and if someone had brought in some cookies to munch on, it would bode well. If that's the only thing they do, and they still suck during the interview, no job.
I'd done this a few times over the years, and in a couple cases never even got a followup call back. If it was because of the cookies/cake/snacks/whatever, then I'm glad I don't work at a place that's so uptight/rigid that they can't take some fun.
FWIW, I didn't take a job after that interview, but was offered one.
By your own words you were called not because any ability of yours stood out, but because you did the right thing to suck up on the right day.
That makes it a good example of how little skill and ability mean in the interview process. That's broken; say the right thing or do the right thing and you're in.
"say the right thing or do the right thing and you're in".
Knowing what those are and how to do this is, by most measures, a good skill to have.
"you were called not because any ability of yours stood out, but because you did the right thing to suck up on the right day".
In that case, the birthday thing was a total fluke, and not really that big a deal, more a happy coincidence. But as I mentioned before, I wouldn't have had an interview in the first place without a baseline of skill/ability already demonstrated through other means (online portfolio, resume, phone screen process). The ability to make a positive memorable impression is, imo, an ability that did stand out.
Applying De Morgan's laws to fix how to determine if you're in or not then yields:
say the wrong thing AND do the wrong thing
I would also like to point out that an ability of your parent poster clearly stood out, that of making themselves memorable. Hiring is a multivariate problem, focusing on just one of those variables could be the most broken solution within the space.
The problem is getting people to understand the accomplishment especially if you have to do some heroic hack to get something mundane but important to work.
The cynic would say: Why were you working on a mundane problem? That's for some other nameless jr. dev to fix while you focus on the high-profile-yet-easy stuff.
If you automate that process - maybe spit the screenshots into weekly emails or a dashboard - and people start working specifically to improve those numbers then you just might have a greater aggregate impact on revenues than the 1/size_of_your_team you presumably have now [1].
This is sarcasm, right? All of these things are clear warnings that it's time to flee that company for your life.
You get paid what you get paid because someone else is willing to pay you more. The market is competitive and you're being hired by your peers, who recognize the value of "making the backup 50% faster".
If you wear a tie and are trying to become a Managing Director at Merrill Lynch, then yes, you need to play this bullshit game. But in that case, you're not getting a "pay rise" for your value to the engineering organization, you're getting paid for your ability to keep the status quo alive and well.
Sadly, every company of a decent size I have worked for seems to fit the profile perfectly. I get the feeling the transition takes place when inertia hits a point that the company can coast on bad decisions and the dedication of a few employees doing the right thing while everyone else plays games.
No. This is non-fiction in finance. "Dominic Connor is a City headhunter at QF Search with a sideline in teaching C++ to bankers", he's also a well-known and respectable enough online personality.
Such evidence also provides a basis for many explanations (appealing to the financial products being to complex) of the 2008 global financial crisis.
I've once played with the idea of a career in quantitative finance, but subsequently fled for my life. Yet, attesting to the wonders of biodiversity, many kinds of life have evolved to thrive in the harshest of conditions.
No, it is not. This is the reason big conglomerates should be split with an axe and left to the vultures.
They are super inefficient because they have incompetents in place that can't measure the real value created by their workers but also because as a company grows bigger and bigger you forget who is your customer and start playing the Soviet Russia central planning trick of "looking like you work is more important than working".
When those big companies like banks show looses, we join them together creating bigger monsters that parasites real economy even more. They then use tricks and more tricks to hide the reality(GM or Enron) so the party continues one more day.
Big companies are incredibly efficient at generating wealth. Look around you.
>They then use tricks and more tricks to hide the reality(GM or Enron) so the party continues one more day.
You cherry pick two large companies, only one of which can actually be considered a failure (if you think GM has been a failure, I don't know what to tell you). You don't think fraud goes on on a massive scale at the small business level? And what about the other 498 companies in the fortune 500?
GM was at least on the verge of bankruptcy a few years ago, but I'm pretty sure that can be attributed more to massively underestimating how much healthcare would cost in 2008 during a union negotiation several decades prior than to any sort of dirty tricks.
Right. And prior to that they produced trillions in revenues over 100+ years of being in business, selling more cars worldwide than ANY other company.
The 2008 bailout is naught but a blip on the radar, so implying that GM hasn't been a good company, and putting them in the same sentence as Enron is sort of out to lunch. GM has been a wealth generation machine for a long time. That's my point.
I'm not huge on the cynicism, but there are solid points here that I wanted to remember. Here's my less-cynical spin in a motivational-speaker style condensation: Show, Celebrate, Support.
Show: make sure the awesome stuff you do is visible to people, and prioritize stuff that will be visible.
Celebrate: do something visible to celebrate your successes and your team's. It makes people feel good and reinforces a sense of progress and success. Buy a round at the pub, bring in a cake, whatever.
Support: publicly support and thank others: other devs, business people, etc. Find nice things to say.
All of these really fall under "be nice and encourage people", and may have the side benefit of getting you paid more.
Bear in mind that this from The Register whose audience is much more skewed towards those working in large corporates, BOFHs and PFYs than the typical audience here.
For me the key sentence to the whole article is "Your boss has no idea if you’re good at your job." Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology? There seems to be this idea that IT folks are "special" and don't understand business and, because it's always been that way, there's no need to change. If you work for a business, it's not OK to be a not have a clue how a business works.
>Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology?
From my experience I think the issue stems for looking at management as the next rung on a ladder. A good developer might never gain or want the experience needed to make her a good manager. A manager might never learn what it takes to be a developer. But the idea of moving up to management ignores the real issue.
Management relates to handling people and handling projects. If you can't deal with people enough to understand how they fit into your project you manage poorly. If you can't manage a project well enough to use the people you have, then you manage poorly.
The skills to manage, and the skills to be a developer/engineer/designer/widgeteer seem, to me, orthogonal. I could write code for ten more years and never learn a thing about management.
The best run tech project I ever worked on involved a PM who could still remember the Great Depression. She had the ability to ask the right questions and had a clear picture of how to move the project forward. The worst managed projects came from the PM who used to code.
But there's no reason a good developer can't be a good manager. They may not have the skills in their current role, but everyone should be able to acquire those skills.
I see no problem with developers becoming managers in theory. But something goes wrong in that transition. Management skills are just like learning any other skill. Skill-learning is something that developers (or the good ones) typically excel at. So why can't developers learn management skills?
I'm a middle-of-the-pack developer that is trying to become a manager.
My first step was taking up managing courses, and an MBA adapted for technology (MMOT).
I believe I've learned a lot of management skills and that they will help me when I make the jump, but I also agree with crasshopper that "empathy, listening, communicating clearly/fairly, inspiring people, making people feel valued" and other "soft/people" skills are skills you don't learn either as a developer or in management school.
So, my answer would be: developers can absolutely learn management skills, but some of them aren't taught in classes.
That also makes it harder to break into management (haven't succeeded yet, employers want people with experience, over qualifications)
I agree with you that any developer who is curious about the larger reasons their paycheck arrives in the mail can & should learn how their business works.
But so many management skills -- empathy, listening, communicating clearly/fairly, inspiring people, making people feel valued -- are orthogonal to programming knowledge/skill.
Do you think? I'm not sure. Speaking as a developer who is now a manager, they're certainly not skills that came naturally but I think I have learned them and practice them fairly well.
Maybe I'll never be the natural that some people are but, with hard work and forcing myself out of my comfort zone, I am doing a good enough job.
"orthogonal" just means "uncorrelated" - not "inversely correlated". Your OP isn't saying those skills are automatically absent in people who code, but rather that ability to code has no bearing on your ability to manage - and vice versa.
Anecdata: I was a programmer transitioning into management. In my first "management" role, I was successful, but I had to fire some people. I went back to being purely technical as soon as I could because I just don't want to do that again.
"But there's no reason a good developer can't be a good manager"
This is very wrong. They required very different skills and personality. Promoting a good developer to management role may hurt the developer himself and eventually destroyed the project/team. My personal experience though.
Many developers aren't good with people. It's the reason they got into development in the first place. Personally, I spent my teenage years in front of a computer 99% of the time.
I'm now in my 30s and it took me years to acquire good people skills. I could be a manager, but I'm running my own company instead, which utilizes all of my skills.
"Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology?"
I know people that are really good at both, they exist and I personally know some of them. It is a pleasure to work with them and they create good teams. They group in clusters, they want to work with people like them.
People like Elon Musk(he was a was programmer, studied physics and business degrees) or Mark Shuterworth are famous and rich but there is also a lot of them around if you know where to search, people that understand technology and people. Try to deceive them with BS!
A lot of people are not so lucky though to work with them. A company have a soul and a culture. Once your living environment is stale you start to believe that is THE world, and your survival skills make you to adapt and become part of the problem yourself, like this man cynic strategy(he uses it because it works in his contaminated environment).
"Why do we do such a bad job of developing people who are good managers/leaders AND understand technology?"
because there is the opposite fallacy which is also derided: the one where the best engineer in the team is promoted to be a manager and in turn no longer does much/any development work.
The bottom line is that while there are great people out there, most people are average or worse (bell curve 101, sorry) and they end up progressing up the career ladder too.
Even the best engineer on the team should understand how the business works though. There's more to being a good engineer in a business than understanding the technical side.
I tend to see people on three paths - they're an engineer and they want to keep coding and getting rewarded for that; or they're an engineer who wants to manage process and people; or they're an engineer who wants to focus more on architecture and design. The person you want to "manage" is the second one - they've a working knowledge of how the tech works but they're actively developing their leadership skills.
Leadership skills are no different from any other skills - they can be learned. In some cases people show more of a "natural" skill in that area but that doesn't meant that it can't still be learned - it'll take you out of your comfort zone but you don't tend to advance unless you do that.
I found this article very enlightening, in an odd way. I've committed several of the errors mentioned in it (out of blithe naiveté, I might add). Very interesting take on Machiavellian job hacking, this.
Personally, I would rather be myself always. Even if I could speed up my career by X% using methods like this, it would still take years upon years to get where I want to be, and by that time my soul would be a burnt out husk.
If you have the intelligence, patience and willpower to put on a mask for that long, I would think that doing a startup is a saner and more enjoyable pursuit in any case.
I would agree with every word you said, except failure rates on startups are very high (much higher than 50%).
So, there is already a large opportunity cost due to the flat time and effort invested plus loss of corporate experience which has the many significant side effects such as skill, social/business contact and guaranteed compensation accrual.
I hope this is some kind of joke that I just didn't get, but otherwise:
This is just a guide for you to be hipocritical and a complete jackass to your coworkers while throwing out any values you have out the window. That's the kind of atitude that ruins the workplace for everyone, congrats on getting more money and also an even shittier job than before.
I know plenty of people that are willing to act like this in order to get more money and they have no respect from me. Grow up and start trying to make yours and everyone else's life better not shittier. Please.
I rather take my work seriously, constructively criticize bullshit company police, and make less money if that's what it takes. At least I won't regret being myself.
err.. the visibility thing's all too real.
just happened to me last week. project is nine months old. was an orphan until 1 month ago manager(s) 2 levels up asked about it. now ? daily updates. and i work at a well known co.
Depends where you get hired. This article seems to deal with getting hired at a company whose main line of business is not technology (say finance, which Dominic seems to recruit for). In that case, your employer will not care about your beautiful C++ code or super-efficient way to do X -- unless you can tie it back to the company's main line of business and making money for the firm. An internal squabble about the more correct way to do X will mean nothing to the non-technical upper management in a non-tech firm. Non-tech firms don't care about technology for the sake of technology because they don't sell technology -- the firm has other priorities and IT is just a side show to help get the firm's mission done.
You can also just communicate the benefits of your work to people. This works especially well if you do it beforehand...eg with the backup process, tell your boss that it saves X hours/month, and include that in your performance review (you should always be writing your own performance reviews, by the way). There's no need to restrict yourself to tasks with visible, obvious value...you just need to take on the work of communicating what it is you contribute.
Well, honestly, for many of the work environments the author refers to, which may not be ones you are I would want to work, the author is correct. The CEO of XYZ corp doesn't care and is not interested in your explanation about how optimizing the thermocouplers makes things better. Even if you tried to relate to how it does save the company, he won't think you know what you're talking about. This is more about playing a psychological, even childish, game with your boss. And I suspect, in fact I'm completely sure, that in these kinds of companies, this is probably the advice you can get. These are the kinds of CEOs for which you could just explain until you're blue in the face about how important backups are for customers and they will stare blankly and wonder why they hired you in the first place.
Why work for a CEO that "doesn't care and is not interesting in your explanation about how optimizing the termocouplers makes thing better"? There are plenty of companies run by people that do understand the low-level details that make their businesses successful. Work there instead.
Remember, they need you more than you need them. They already admitted that they don't understand their own business!
I agree, which is why I wouldn't work there. But that is the reality many face in our industry. Not everybody works at a hip startup. Many work at those "enterprise" places.
It's a continuum. In maybe 1% of companies you won't have to show your value, because everyone will know. In 10% it won't matter what you do, because you'll be distrusted anyway. But the vast majority of the time, learning to communicate your value will increase others' perception of you and lead to better raises.
This article pertains mostly to large, sclerotic firms with a pronounced suit-geek divide, somewhat like the blood-brain barrier. But it also exists in IT in higher ed as well. I suppose anyone with a modicum of professional pride would not want to work at a firm where the executives believe that managing IT is like herding cats--unless they were paid enough to guarantee the author a sufficiently high commission. (Knuth, incidentally, distinguishes computer science from IT and states that his interests lie with the former.)
When you say "IT in higher ed", are you referring to personal experience? That's a pretty specific domain, just wanted to know if you have any specific anecdotes.
A bit one-sided argument, but might be very common in some large companies. Indeed, if you're in the situation described in the article, the best bet is to play the game, knowing the constraints, and to do the least work for the most bang.
If you actually want to enjoy your work, having a chance to create something new/different/efficient, in the environment where your "boss" is your peer, and your boss understand the value of 50% performance increase and is willing to spend time to understand why your backend is better than other's backend, then pick a startup.
I am not just saying pick my startup, no, pick any startup that fits you. There are so many companies out there, if you search hard enough you can find the product / team that interests you, and people you're willing to work with. That said, be prepared to work hard, to have to fix bugs on the weekends, to probably carry your laptop everywhere you go, and finally, to have a lower salary than before.
It's pretty simple, imho, you can't have everything all at once, but you can pick the combination that is right for you. All you need is to do it. Do or do not, there's no try. ;)
my boss, the owner of the company, had me explain my job to him at least 3 times during my time there. He was the one that hired me and still didn't know exactly what I did.
It was extremely frustrating when he asking me to do graphic design work and he didn't understand why it wasn't part of my job (I was hired as a developer, I wrote their entire e-commerce system which ran their business for 4 years).
That isn't quite true. A lot of recruiters that I've met get paid based on the salary of the recruited, so fewer people at higher salary might make the recruiter more money.
Simplistic EG (and a 2x 80,000 vs 120,000 is realistic), but, like a real estate agent, the cost of NOT closing the sale is greater then pushing for a marginal increase in the sale.
EG salary, pushing for 115,000 vs 105,000 the difference in fee on 20% is 2,000. Which is ~200-400 dollars difference in commission. Losing the offer for pushing for 115,000? 2,300~4,600 (10-20% of fee).
Your making some interesting assumptions like it is three times as easy to fill a $65k spot than a $120k spot. The recruiters I knew had pretty good contacts that gave them the ability to place highly paid salaries (Oracle DBA, SAP developer) at a pretty good clip, much better than the generic recruiter. Their shooting for the higher-end gave them the right reputation to do this well.
A dude at a previous place of work took the following initiative: he emailed everyone at the company asking for their ideas for improvement, promising a daily prize in the form of movie tickets (which were presumably funded by upper management).
He did this for several weeks, collecting a ton of great, actionable ideas from the people in the trenches. It was all kinds of stuff, from IT to customer service to employee morale, etc.
Then, he went to upper management with a bunch of curated, highly relevant, enterprise-spanning improvement ideas. Win-win-win situation: employees get movie tickets and fixes, upper management gets a better-running business, idea-rally dude gets to take credit for all of it.
There's no law against refusing to promote weasels. And it's really not too hard to detect them, if you spend any time with them - psychopaths are superficially charming, but always trip up with their continuous and inconsistent lies.
But businesses think "he's a weasel, but he's our weasel". Yeah, right.
My fellow readers, this article is definitely not cynicism or sarcasm, it has some very good suggestions for the "IT" people in corporate of America, especially Fortune 100.
If you think or use the word "hack" in your job, then it is not for you - and that is a good thing, isn't.
No, that's why honest people avoid enterprises. There are lots of smart people with slack morals working for big businesses and Wall Street. ADDED: There are also plenty of less smart and honest people working for big businesses on lower level jobs, I was just objecting to the claim that all smart people avoided them.
The EDS video was a Super Bowl ad from the peak of the dot-com boom back in 2000. I remember it well because that was the year virtually all of the ads aired during the Super Bowl were dot-com related.. lots of money spent on lots of ads by companies that mostly don't exist anymore (see also: the infamous Pets.com sockpuppet guy).
They key here is that you’re making a difference when it hits the fan, that’s not someone they want to lose.
The crap getting paid too much is the author of this article. Your job as software developer (or any other field) is to do your job the best you can. You are offered the salary before you start the work and you agreed on it. The market will define how much valuable you are to the business. You can see that in the last year, our salaries have increased considerably.
What do you think ‘the market’ is? The market is made up of people just like you, a pool of bids and offers, with bidders (that is, employers or clients) trying to get the best price for a good or service, and the merchants (employees) trying to make the most money from the provision of those services—or at the very least to make a sale at all.
Markets are most efficient when there is full transparency. Unfortunately you don't know the salaries of the people you work with, or the budgets of the people you work for. We have to accept this information asymmetry as a fact of life, because your colleagues probably feel uncomfortable discussing their compensation packages, and your managers don't reveal their budgets to you specifically so they can save money. They may have been willing to pay you $100k, but if you settle for $80k they aren't going to argue, and you've just put $20k back into their budget that they were planning on giving you anyway. That doesn't mean a lot to them, but to you that could have been a new car and a luxury holiday.
The fact that you don't understand the importance of leverage in negotiations (that is, making yourself seem extremely valuable to the organisation) is precisely why you aren't on $200k or more at the moment.
And please don't kid yourself that you'll get to avoid all of this stuff by joining a startup. A founder or CEO of a small company is going to be even more aggressive in getting you to sign on the dotted line for a low price, since the company may be funded out of their own pocket (as opposed to a manager controlling a budget).
And what about founding a startup? Well, you'll have to decide on a price to set your customers. Again, you need those unique selling points and some great marketing to make your customers feel like they can't function without you. If you decide to go down the VC route, you'll be wrapped up in negotiations and due diligence for weeks or months, and if you don't bring the full force of your negotiating abilities, you'll be signing away a large share of equity at a low price that you may regret for the rest of your life.
No-one, absolutely no-one gets to skip the negotiations and still come out the other end with a 'fair' price or salary. These are facts of life, and whilst I don't think they're particularly unpleasant, if you decide to ignore them you'll be left behind as the rest of us shoot up the career ladder.
Very cynical view. If this is what's happening across companies, than the market system wasn't efficient enough or was impeded to make a change.
We all know that the local cable or telephone companies aren't trying their damn hardest and we are not pleased with the services we're getting. However, we can't do anything about it.
To me, it's incomprehensible that we can sit on our hand and not make things better. Instead of being a big bully in the market, why not aim to make our lives better? Why all the politicking when it's quite urgent that medical progress need to be made now?
After all, a million dollars or three won't make much a difference in respect to making a billion dollars on a monopoly. With the billion dollars in hand, the future of you, and everyone else is worse off, because you focused too much on marketing rather than on groundbreaking research.
Do pharmaceutical CEOs only care about their short term bottom line and not the future of their health, their family, and their friends?
Do AT & T corporate board really only care about what they made each day rather than the future of the internet? By expanding and making the infrastructure cheaper, they will benefit from the numerous services of future internet.
Expand pie, and don't focus too much on getting a larger portion of the pie. Don't compromise the size of the pie.
Try reading the article, it might give you something else to write a banal rant about. Or should I say rants, each sentence seems to be about a different subject.
Your final exhortation about pies is just baffling, "don't compromise the size of the pie" is something I might just put on a T shirt.
Well, I thought "expanding the pie" versus "taking a larger portion of the pie" are particularly common metaphor for growing economy versus taking advantage of the economy.
Around here, the somewhat more technical terms "production" and "rent seeking" will probably serve you better. Folks on news.yc have already passed Randian Thought 101.
> With the billion dollars in hand, the future of you, and everyone else is worse off, because you focused too much on marketing rather than on groundbreaking research.
I don't think so. More likely, we're playing a massively multiplayer Prisoner's Dilemma, where too few of us collaborate. Sure, if a sufficient proportion of humanity worked at making the world a better place instead of trying to get richer, even they would be better off. I doubt however that we're even close to that critical mass.
Also, don't forget that grounbreaking discoveries are science fiction until they're not. No one plans for science fiction. Heck, even the eventual obsolescence of drivers (truck, taxi, bus) is widely perceived as science fiction, even though self-driving exist today. Because, you know, "there always will be the need for human intervention". (Even then, it wouldn't mean a human is needed in the damn truck all the freaking time. The truck can make a phone call when it has a problem.)
No, not cynical only realistic and maybe a little bit sarcastic. The whole system is oscilating towards mediocracy (if such a word doesn't exist, I already apology for my English), and it seems a lot of companies, espacialy the big ones, have reached a point where the only choice left is either playing the game or try to get things done. The latter won't work.
Regarding the pie picture, people care too much about the relative size of the piece they get and not about getting a ton or a mere 10 gramm...
The rest of your post doesn't really have anything to do with the article but...
Very cynical view. If this is what's happening across companies, than the market system wasn't efficient enough or was impeded to make a change.
It is a cynical view, but another way the author could have stated it would be to say that in order to have people know who you are, you should do projects that matter to people and make sure they know you are doing them.
The worst people I have worked with, on teams, as employees etc. are the ones who decide to do things like optimize the backup process by 50% when no one needs that done. They miss the big picture which is easy to see if you follow the author's (while I admit cynical) strategy.
but another way the author could have stated it would be to say that in order to have people know who you are, you should do projects that matter to people and make sure they know you are doing them.
In my view, it is only about visible progress that they can see, but they cannot easily see invisible progress that actually matters.
The worst people I have worked with, on teams, as employees etc. are the ones who decide to do things like optimize the backup process by 50% when no one needs that done. They miss the big picture which is easy to see if you follow the author's (while I admit cynical) strategy.
The big picture includes having a backup plan and having a backup plan that works.
The big picture includes having a backup plan and having a backup plan that works.
Sure, but the grandparent was complaining about overoptimization. I've been in management, and having an engineer who seizes on the wrong thing - something which could be better, but is currently good enough - and ignores the higher priority item I want them to work on, is a terrible headache.
Having a backup system in place is important, and I think most management understands that and would like to "see" it be built.
If someone is ultra technical and working with someone ultra non-technical that will create friction if they are talking about future potential problems, especially due to scale.
But, I would assume any company you are working for as a technical person generally has someone technical in charge of you.
I would never run a company as a business person with a lot of technical knowledge without a strong technical cofounder who can manage the technical team.
I am probably making an assumption here that everyone thinks like that, and most likely that is a bad assumption.
I didn't totally agree with the article but could explain your criticism a little; I wonder if we read the same article or maybe interpreted it in wildly different ways. The author is just using kind of this common sense pragmatism/cynical stuff many people probably hear from their bosses already.
There is approximately no-one on HN, not even at the best managed firms with the least BS imaginable, who would not experience positive ROI from "Congrats guys, we just shipped X, let's have a celebratory dinner at $FAVORITE and I'm buying." That idea is freaking genius. It gets you instant political capital and will make sure decisionmakers actually remember X the next time it rolls around because they'll have a hundred projects to worry about but only one or two which were so important they had celebratory dinners at completion.