That's how it works for every organization. Not just corporate America. Want to play on the varsity baseball team? Better be popular with the coaches and other players. Otherwise you're on the bench keeping score. Want to go to Harvard grad school? Better be the right kind of popular. Want to be celebrated in machine learning? Better be popular by doing shallow work on lots of projects. The whole world is a scam, and the scammers always win.
I don't think it's a scam, I think all too often people forget that people don't just automatically know things that are going on. It's an important life lesson: telling the story is as important as taking the action. "If you build it, they will come" is bunk
Marketing, publicity, networking, call it what you will. If no one knows a feature is in your app, it doesn't matter how good it is. You see this in politics too. That's why you have those signs on the road saying "your tax dollars at work"
I bet you can think of any number of poorly publicized success stories that didn't get the credit they deserved, or became victims of the invisibility of their success
FWIW, coming from another unknown internet person, this is 100% the best reply to this whole thread and the most pragmatic way in corporate life. If you think otherwise, you're an idealist and I wish all the best for you in what I suspect you might find a frustrating career. Unless you create your own company.
Writing “I ignore the spotlight as a staff engineer” with a long description of how they’re better than the other person, is not something a leader that will rise in any company should be writing for the public, even if they’ve given up.
Someone else will always at some point will steal or deserve the spotlight.
You can’t have a successful show full of prima donnas that all vie for the lead role on stage. You can do your best, and have some way to promote yourself for compensation when the time comes, but if there’s this much of a problem that you feel you have to write a lengthy defense to the public, you’ve lost your way and should go elsewhere/
Exactly. One shouldn't confuse the spotlight with communication. This is just a matter of letting the appropriate people know the things you want them to know or they need to know. We're social animals. We communicate. If someone doesn't know what you're doing, then, as the Captain says, we have a failure to communicate. Being able to communicate is a core life skill and part of what it means to be a functioning adult.
(I'm also willing to bet that the very same people who pout about not being "appreciated" would be the first to complain about someone "hovering" or "spying" on them, because that's what it would take for someone to know what you're up to in such cases. Like, make up your mind, bruh.)
And if you take a moment to think about it, those who expect others to just know what they've done are displaying the very narcissistic behavior they often claim to be avoiding. After all, why you? Why should anyone know what you, of all people, are doing? Do you know what others are doing? No, you don't. Not until they tell you or someone who has been told knows. You may think you know, but there is plenty that you don't know, and to be fair, perhaps don't need to know. The world does not revolve around you. Like you (I would hope), people have their own lives and tasks and concerns.
Think of something as everyday as a PR. Even if your manager looks at every PR, he doesn't know what you did to get there unless you communicate that to him. Unless you write it down and share it or tell him that you've experimented with three different approaches before settling on the chosen one, or done some kind of detailed analysis based on which you drew up your design, how the hell is he going to know?
And even if a manager should know certain things, it is pointless to make that appeal. So what if he should? Aren't there things you should be doing but aren't, like, say, communicating with clarity and coherence? "Shoulding" doesn't make things so. You have to deal with the world as it is, not as you would like it to be. Every manager is different. If your manager requires a huge banner and a neon sign to get the message, then that's what it takes to make him know things. Behave accordingly.
There's an exception though if you're truly good. If you can hit home runs or throw a baseball with laser accuracy and speed you will be on the varsity team even if you're an introverted social misfit. You might not be team captain but bottom line is the coach wants players who can win games, not be prom king.
It’s not a scam. It’s a system that exists for people and made by people. Period. Money, outcomes and so on only have value because people assign them value. If you remove people then what you do has no value or concept of value. Life is not some video game with an omniscient score counter. Other people are the score counter.
In your lens: people are often horrible at keeping score, distracted by values that do no help them win overall.
Not necessarily a bad thing at times. Of course some chance encounter that builds a friendship or even family can be worth not winning that ball game. But actions have consequences and maybe someone else needed to win to get their goals fulfilled.
In my lens the only true score is the collection perception of the score. Not a number, not a formula and not what you think the score is. There is no external absolute counter you can point to because the collective view is the truth.
You are part of the collective, but that does not necessarily mean that your perception matters for the purpose of the score, what this thread is about. Sticking to thread, in terms of perspective on corporate world, are you a decision-maker? or do you have any significant influence on a decision-maker? if no then your perception simply does not matter for the game that is being played.
But also applies to politics you're alluding too. Every election cycle is strewn with the paper votes of much of the electorate because, although they're part of the collective, it turns out their perception didn't matter. You can pretend you opt out of the score but unless you're planning to live on in a different country/planet you cant really.
Your perception matters to you and your values. It's still important but it's a mistake to assume it has to matter to the rest of society/corporation overall
Well sure. That's why we're in this situation. We (perhaps correctly) think no one cares about us in the wider society.
There's two reactions to this. Accept this and make your own trail in life, perhaps becoming a decision maker in the process. Or find others and collect together to make sure your agreed upon ideas can and must be heard.
There is no objective score and thus people are perfect at it since the score is by definition what other people think it is. Like the value of money or stocks. Once you realize that a lot of life is significantly less frustrating.
I'd say life becomes more frustrating of you really think this extreme. You realize your values and then realize certain people with contradictoryvalues aren't part of your community, hut obstacles to overcome. Now it's not a team game, it's a battle royale. Not necessarily winner take all, but overall a lot of people will lose more than they win.
A collective sense of "score" is needed to prevent that.
It’s got nothing to do with values but value. Are you doing things that provide value. Once you realize the only measure of that is how other people perceive what you’ve done it’s a lot less frustrating. It makes thing more cooperative as you now need to work with others and communicate with others and you know that versus clinging to a siloed invalid notion of value.
That goes into what my above reply warns about. Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
If some manager's value is "I just need to phone it in and retire" and you are misson-driven, you have an obstacle. Now you're going behind the back of the obstacle trying to stand out, and essential work isn't being met. Mamager panics, has to do more work and probably chastises the other person. Each are only trying to follow what their goals "value".
We do need "values", plural. "Values" will help let out singular "value" compromise as needed. So we shift from "I just want to retire" to "okay, I'll male sure the excited one can get on bigger projects while I chill". And let's the "I want to change the world" types occasionally compromise with "okay this person needs help for a moment". It's not crushing dreams but also making sure that other collective goals are met.
> Of their "value" is something that contradicts yours, you have an obstacle, not a team working towards a goal.
The goal is to ensure that for the value someone else can offer you, you have something of equal value to offer to them in kind.
If you are useless blob, that's not an obstacle, it merely means you're not even trying to be a team player. Face life alone if you so wish, but since the dawn of time humans have leaned into social organization for good reason.
And thars why the social contract is broken. The companies aren't even bothering to reciprocate, so why care about their values if they don't care about you?
You have your own goals and the company considers you a "useless blob", no matter how you align. Becauee the only value they see in you is pushing pencils. . That's how we create a low trust society.
The social contract is broken, but I'm not sure you've correctly identified the cause.
The reality is that a lot of people have truly become useless blobs. Look at Apple's 54 billion dollar cash holdings just sitting there waiting for something of value to cash it in for. That's 54 billion dollars in promises people made to deliver value that they've never made good on. Or, to put it another way, Apple has given away 54 billion dollars in value away for free...
...-ish. Theoretically they can still seek the promises that others made for future value delivery so it isn't technically free is the truest sense of the word, but for all practical purposes it is so. What on earth could you or I ever offer in return to make good on the promise of value we made? I mean, HN tends to be a little more inventive than the general population so maybe you can I can conjure up something at some point. But the average Joe on the street? What are they going to offer to turn that $54 billion promises into actual value? Let's be realistic. At this point, it's never going to happen.
Once upon a time we got this bright idea that if everyone funnelled into university research labs we'd start to all create all kinds of new value to deliver. It was a noble thought, if a bit unrealistic. But somehow that idea got watered down into "go to university so you can get a job pushing paper around", and now the masses don't even understand what value is anymore.
"Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.
>if everyone funnelled into university research labs
University is an excellent microcosm for analyzing the social compact breakdown, because most of the value has been created by transient workers. With levels of cooperation that any profitable enterprise will laugh at, that value, if properly appreciated, will dwarf GDP.[0]
So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.
There's the idea of the long-tail that nobody talks about now, it's still quite relevant, and I'm glad HN is keeping the flame.
[0] seminaries (quasi universities) did a suboptimal values-value tradeoff compared to the Teutonic model. Bell Labs 19xx-1970 obviously had an even better model, surfing on the transience. Internship program was the magic? Values-value resonance? The secret that neither ArcInst nor OpenAI will (re)discover? (Latter too coupled to value!) The profound Ability to capture value from joe and Joe?
Think they were called "program managers" or something.. incubators of valueS. And they didn't need to say what they were working on (contradicting conventional "Apple" wisdom)
i'd love to hear more of your philosophical perspective on IP, historiographic/economic evidence that you've accumulated
> "Values" is (one way) how strangers bootstrap trust, "value" is how colleagues (dare I say "compadres") maintain it.
1. That would imply that if you and I bootstrap trust and then disappear from each other's lives for 20 years, when we finally meet again that the trust will have been lost and will have to be rebuilt. Color me skeptical. It seems to me that most people will, once established, continue with trust until there is some reason to change their mind. It does not need to be maintained, but can be destroyed.
2. Value and trust are not intrinsically linked. In fact, that is the primary reason for why we have a legal system: So that you and I can exchange value without any need to trust each other. If one of us does something stupid within that, the other can send out the hired goons to mess up one's day, thus giving strong motivation to act in good faith towards each other without the presence of trust.
> So I'd agree with GP that values, lack thereof, both internal to academia and of society at large, was the source of the rot.
Nah. Like you said, "values" are only relevant to bootstrapping trust, but trust doesn't scale. Never has, never will. Studies have shown that people can only ever get to know hundreds of people in their lifetime, and cannot even recognize more than a few thousand faces. You cannot build any kind of relevant society on communal trust. Even the smallest communities we find today have way more people than an individual can mange to keep track of. Which, again, is why we establish legal systems instead.
Maybe eons ago, when there were only 100 people on earth, we had a society where values were relevant. But the not-broken social contract being spoken of cannot be from that era. There is no record of that time.
It's going to be hard for me to argue the existence of "high trust" versus "low trust" societies, but I'm happy to accept the relative observability of functional legal regimes. From then on we can discuss whether trust in _systems of rules_ can scale.
you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example of a __productive__ system where informal contracts are the norm --so people default to using shared "values" and "folkways" to guide their activities and interactions -- you might argue that unconstrained exploration doesn't scale either.
As for the Dunbar number, it's been popular for HNers to argue for startups that way. "Doing things that don't scale" is one contrarian moral that seem to not involve a lot of legalese at its core. Most effective company lawyers should be like managers, invisible? And startup lawyers-- shared?
Value and trust. I somehow think we agree but I flubbed the exposition. Later.
> you might not like to talk about research orgs. Though I think they are example
Are they a good example, or are they simply an example of where the stakes are low to non-existent? If the farmer fails to make good on delivering value (i.e. food), there is real risk of you staving to death. That's a problem. If a researcher fails to deliver value. Oh well...? Hell, the very nature of research is such that sometimes value will not be found so that idea is baked in.
These are delicate issues. Not least because research value takes an unpredictably (default long) time to harvest. Here's an agricultural example, which exposes some of the same. Might not be better than the above though it could move the discussion: vanilla farming
-guy discovers manual pollination, unable to capture value in his lifetime.
-people don't starve when they can't have vanilla in their soft serve, but it's still one of the more expensive spices.
-lawlessness means farmers often lose harvests to thiefs.
-Ongoing research to automate pollination (& move production to more developed polities) but I don't think the status quo is going to budge in the coming decades, mostly because the end users always get their supply
The hypothetical vanilla farmer hasn't reached a place of having value. Only after the vanilla is actually able to be captured as value does the farmer enter into trade with it. This scenario you've outlined is much like the entrepreneurial software developer in his basement working on his secret startup idea. Until he has a working MVP that people actually want to buy, he's just there on his own trying to find value to deliver.
This is not aligned with the participation spoken of earlier where the value is already established and others are giving up their value under the expectation of receiving equal value in kind. You're going down a much different road here.
Sorry again I was more interested in the ongoing vanilla automation research angle-- where the value of current research strat not established. that's why it's the last point, though contrasted by structure to the first (so the question is "better" IP infra all you need to shift the status quo, how interaction between value and values can guide design/deployment of research infra)
All examples are not hypothetical, there are indeed vanilla farmers who have demo'd enough value to buy (unregulated) shotguns+ammo, but not to DIY that,or hire goons OR proper research managers :)
(Abstract just to demo some basic convo "value", note that it's undergrad project and already paywalled :)
Trying to establish we agree on the basics, then move on to questions we're both interested in.
Edit: related thread that I hamfistedly tried to participate in, I'm guessing I'm more inclined to think this guy is providing some value, even if you discount he earned 10+ karma from this very comment -- which means the top one, less insightful imho, has like nX ??!!:)
The example I am going to point to is TSMC/Morris Chang.
> During his 25-year career (1958–1983) at Texas Instruments, he rose up in the ranks to become the group vice president responsible for TI's worldwide semiconductor business.[19] In the late 1970s, when TI's focus turned to calculators, digital watches and home computers, Chang felt like his career focused on semiconductors was at a dead end at TI.
The guy was literal gold, and Texas Instruments pivoted away from him (I have also read that anti-Asian sentiment in the USA/TI created a glass ceiling where he could never be CEO
His ability to "hit home runs" was ignored in the USA, and only worked in his favour in the ROC/Taiwan. In both cases (positive and negative) it wasn't his ability, but who believed in him that made the difference.
Edit: At the risk of drawing (more) ire for making it political.
Almost all of the "isms" that the left are (in general) working to stop, are actually preventing economies from reaching their full potential - sexism, racism are the really big ones (because of the sheer numbers of people they affect)
This might be a reasonable summary of the situation but I suspect it's vastly oversimplified. The trajectory of these businesses depends on more than who's name is at the top of the org chart. TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not clearly the case. TI's move is basically them trying to be Apple or NVIDIA instead of Intel or TSMC. Because they failed at that, doesn't necessarily mean that attempting it was wrong.
And none of this necessarily has anything to do with Morris Chang personally. Many factors need to align for a company like TSMC to be successful. Morris Chang may be one of them, but there are other factors that may or may not have existed at TI. The claim that they didn't exist at TI because TI didn't like Morris Chang is not something we'll ever know for sure.
>TI pivoting away from semiconductors and towards other goods may seem like a stupid move in hindsight, but even in hindsight it's not clearly the case
I think even by the turn of the 90's this could be seen as an extraordinarily stupid move. The PC was on the up and up and they abandon expertise on a resource that will only explode in demand? I'm sure there was some cushy educational deals with school supplies, but they literally left a gold mine for China.
Well yea. If you truly look at US history, you'll see the current situation in 2025 is ultimately a huge counter reaction to the idea of colored people and women being able to work alongside Caucasians, and some of the latter just couldn't stand that. "when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression"
So. Tear down the unions and regulations, let the rich consolidate wealth, and everything else in between for 50 years. They are still moserable, but hey. They feel better than Enrique over there who just wanted his kids to love a better life.
Sometimes achievements speak for themselves and provide the marketing for the actor. But that requires both the achievement to be extremely outsized, so as not to get lost in the noise, and very obviously the result of a singular actor. Only one person can step up to the plate and swing the bat.
Depends. Look at the graph of month year of professional hockey player[1]. Player born in first quarter is twice as more likely to be in pro leagues than last quarter. Month of birth's only effect is that it gives 0.5 year extra during junior year to be in spotlight. It shouldn't affect player's performance in any other way. And the effect persists for decades.
If you get supported initially when you aren't the best, the effect of the small support can make you much better player.
In the US, USA Hockey (by far the biggest youth hockey organization) groups players by birth year. So if you are born late in the year, you are among the youngest players on your team. You tend to be smaller, and less experienced, and unless you are exceptional you tend to play less. This impacts you from your first youth teams up until high-school.
Where I went to school the coach distributed chewing tobacco to players he liked and bullied the nerds. The black kid who was extremely athletic got bullied and switched schools. The starting pitcher was an idiot who drove a big truck, and was not especially talented.
Yeah I'm assuming the coach is a normal person who's goal is to build a team and win. If his goal as an adult is to have a lot of teenagers for friends because he himself is still stuck in that mentality, then there's not much you can do but get away.
True, but how many skip managers are going to go scouting in a large tech company for a great developer who is working on the internal performance review system?
The skip manager has a lot to do with promotions in my experience.
Yeah I agree. For sports, that player may end up being a spark for a billion dollar campaign. For a dev, not so much. They want to try and commoditize that role anyway.
But calling the whole world a scam feels like letting the worst parts define the whole yet it can feel like the game is rigged in favor of the loudest or most connected
It is a scam, it's objective. If you live in ignorance of this you will eventually be taken advantage of. There is nowhere on the planet you can live where you can take people or systems of people at their word.
If it's only an eventuality, then doesn't that imply that you can mostly take people at their word? If you do nine deals, and get scammed on the the tenth, then doesn't that mean those first nine people are honest and could be taken at their word?
lol no the eventuality is because a lot of people are just too poor to even be allowed to engage in deals — they're largely living in faceless systems where they're pre-scammed by faceless corporations
Sorry, but this feels like a very American take. There are places in the world that still have high social cohesion and high trust. Not everyone is out to get you everywhere all the time, just in societies which encourage that sort of relating to others.
there are high trust societies where you still cannot take people at their word because it might not be a culture of being direct to others. thinking of japan which is high social cohesion and trust, but still difficult to navigate business contexts due to how problems would be communicated.
Which one would you recommend? because AFAIK most of them are consuming the American products that are constantly scamming you... I've experienced this as a resident of the EU as well.
with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it. getting into harvard - nothing to do with popularity. mom&pop alumni perhaps or you can just be a great student, I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals. machine learning - most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of (I’ve heard of one through a colleague).
"with all due respect, every word you wrote is wrong. michael jordan was and still is biggest a-hole that every teammate hated - the best to ever do it."
Bronnie James is in the NBA... ... .. . Michael Jordan was terrible at baseball and got to sign up for a real chance at the MLB.
"most celebrated are ones pulling 7-8-figure salaries no one has ever heard of"
You've got a direct contradiction in the span of one sentence... I've directly worked with people like the ones you're referring to and most of them were frauds.
"I know several harvard grads who are about as popular as wahington generals"
You didn't understand what I wrote. It's all about the dynamics of the environment. Academia is as much about fitting in just as much as any other place.
I think your definition of popular is holding you back. If popular just means other people like you, you’re obviously wrong- plenty of people are very successful even though they are disliked. Often this will happen multiple times on a single team at a company.
If popular means you’re perceived as valuable, you’re obviously right. All institutions are social institutions and operate on social understandings of value. So to be successful you have to be perceived as valuable by these social structures.
I think calling this a scam misunderstands the non-quantitative metrics of worth. There isn’t actually a Best Academic, a Best Engineer, or a Best Coworker in some measurable objective sense. Those are all social evaluations and they’re valuable because of that, not despite it
No one that played high school sports can possibly believe this.
Everyone knows by day two who the gifted players are, who is average and who sucks. The good players are never bench warmers because everyone wants to win.
The world is made up of a bunch of average people by definition but there is a percentage of those average people that think they are gifted when they are not.
Then they blame the world for not understanding their "genius".
The most brilliant person I know dropped out of medical school and just raced up the corporate ladder. It took her about 2 months in any role for management to see she should move up. Myself on the other hand have had to really grind it out, constantly learning and networking to improve my luck because I am just so very average.
