>> Since graduating from undergraduate studies (which marks exactly one year as I write this post)
Author sounds young .. yes, absolutely try to consume less and create more, it's way more life-affirming than the opposite configuration, but:
Getting better at your job, like everything else in life, is just a function of time. Show up, and then show up consistently. Put in the time. Be patient. Lead with an open mind and an open heart -- opportunities go to those who are present way more often than those who aren't. Willingly take on shitty jobs, do them well, and you'll find yourself being trusted with bigger and better jobs. Learn when to be the worker bee and when to be the queen bee. Say "yes" until you're truly able to say "no". Try to accept that, at the end of the day, things don't matter as much as you think they might -- I'm talking about projects, stress, deadlines, shit that floods your veins with cortisol. The only thing people will truly remember is how you made them feel during a crisis, not the minutiae of what you actually contributed -- and those personal relationships will be the gasoline in the engine of your career.
I really believe people will go far if they focus on this kind of stuff, and way less on structured self-improvement, productivity hacking, finding "secrets", shortcuts via programs, seminars, coaches, and tools, and all that shallow, nutritionless baloney.
Totally agree with everything you've said, brain train for the actual job by doing the actual job and immersing in it as thoroughly and consistently as you can, do things others find boring or difficult.
In case the author IS young, I would also add this: Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can.
If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward.
Unless you achieve financial escape velocity or end up in an increasingly rare engineering "jobs program" at a large entity, you will get rug pulled at some point due to founder/manager proclivities or due to other macro economic issues.
You are probably screwed if this happens to you young enough as it fucks up motivation, it's why among the older programmer crowd you see some former HS dropouts that started professional work way too young (in the early days of the digital revolution) for a toxic company just completely burn out and fuck up their reward circuitry (it's also part of why 2 round leukemia kids have worse longterm outcomes than 1 round or non-leukemia kids).
You want to already have experienced patterns of good faith behavior and delay your first rug pull as long as possible.
> If you work in an environment where personal production and job security are orthogonal you might find yourself getting rug pulled where effort/contribution are fully decoupled from reward.
This is a great point.
When you find yourself in a workplace where job security is based more on vibes than production it creates a false sense of security. You think your personal productivity doesn't matter and that you can vibe your way into the good graces of people making decisions.
When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently. Other people are going to be better at playing the vibes game than you are. Vibes-based companies are overly vulnerable to politics.
It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.
> When jobs security is decoupled from productivity, the winds of the company can and do change frequently.
But that is always the case, and the "productivity=security" environment is artificial and unnatural.
The large forces beyond your control dominate the world, and the whole companies get hit by redundancies because the market changed, AI ate some section of the market, or the banks were too busy playing with mortgages and collapsed the whole global economy.
My experience indicates that it's more important to be working on the right thing, than to be super productive working on the wrong thing.
> It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.
Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day. This may sound normal and natural to everyone, but I don’t like it. I cannot work in an environment in which they ask me to be a high performer, and anything else is “below expectations”. It’s just not worth it.
Much better to have job (in)security detached from productivity: in any case, companies are not to be trusted, and one should be ready to switch at any moment.
> Not in my opinion. These kind of companies ask you to give 100% of yourself every single day.
No, I understand can understand how someone would come away with that conclusion based on common patterns in the industry, but I think you're conflating two things.
First, companies want teams that deliver value. If evaluation is based more on vibes than actual output, that's a management failure. Its nuanced, because bad vibes can really hurt teams a lot, so it's not that vibes don't matter, but if the source of the vibes is that management is clueless and doesn't understand the pain points on the front lines, then that's the bigger issue. As a junior engineer it can be hard to distinguish, but just understand that good management exists and is out there, it's not all pointy hairs (even if the language is sometimes the same, after all pointy hairs have to cargo cult off of someone).
Second is how much a company asks of you. Once you rise up the ranks in any sizable company you'll realize an incredible amount of effort is wasted just due to the overhead of coordinating many individuals. In these types of environments it's more about focusing on the right things rather than overall effort. As Steve Jobs said, "It doesn't make sense to hire smart people and then tell them what to to , We hire smart people so they can tell us what to do". Entire teams can be net negative because no one calls out the elephant in the room. While it's true, that if you are successful in a high performance org, more will be asked of you, it's also true that good leaders value solid contributors even when they set some boundaries.
So there are really two strategies in a large org: one is to do the bare minimum and keep your head down, in that case avoiding high performing orgs is probably a good idea. But at the end of the day your entire job and career is at the mercy of the beancounters waking up one day and realizing you are dead weight. Alternatively, you can adopt a growth mentality, do your best every day, and see where it takes you. The latter path does mean you might need to set some boundaries and say no to people at times. Sure it's awkward, but in the grand scheme of things this builds a stronger network and sets you up for long-term success far better than playing defense because you see the employer-employee relationship as fundamentally adversarial. I think that worldview makes sense from a physical labor workforce, but it's really self-defeating for software engineers because at the end of the day our output is what our code does (hence every IC is "managing" the tech output), not how much time we put in creating it.
> It's good to work at companies where productivity is tied to personal performance, even if measuring productivty is far from perfect.
It’s best to play to your strengths. If you’re better at playing office politics than at doing the actual work, working for a company that values competence will produce subpar results for you.
I’d rather take vibes based than some artificial productivity measure.
“Far from perfect” is laughable- they aren’t even close to measure anything that is rooted in reality.
I would argue that all productivity metrics are even more vibes based than just going after vibes.
> Stay away from startups with capricious, absentee or already wealthy founders, find the most productive, stable environment you can.
I don’t think this is necessarily true. The job I learned most was one where I was the only tech person working on a product that had a more or less absent founder. I had to teach myself of course, but if you are self motivated you can learn a lot there.
Just don’t expect to get rewarded for it. See it as being paid in knowledge instead of money.
> The only thing people will truly remember is how you made them feel during a crisis, not the minutiae of what you actually contributed
I agree with your general point about relationships being the most important, but I disagree that your contributions don't matter. You need to have at least some good contributions combined with good relationships.
Through my career I've encountered a lot of coworkers who were fun to be around but either produced very little or had poor quality output. The value of their good vibes declines as the consequences of their low output and/or poor code quality accumulate on the team's shoulders.
You also see this a lot when vetting employee referrals. A lot of people will enthusiastically refer friends and people they like being around, but who are not necessarily great contributors. These people seek referrals at a disproportional rate because, well, they tend to be laid off more frequently and might struggle to get through job interviews through normal channels.
Employees will refer this people because they want them around, but once you start communicating to people that referrals are equivalent to personally vouching for their referral's abilities, half of the time they start walking back referrals or saying that the person needs a good manager and so on.
So agree that relationships matter, but it's going to be hard to build a career on relationships alone. You need some substance and contributions to build upon.
+1. A somewhat similar case that is close to my heart is when people with good intentions make bad decisions. A bad decision is bad, no matter the intentions. If you want to change the world, I think you need to be a “good person” and _also_ critically evaluate what you do
This. Slow, but consistent is the way to win. Like they say in Rally Racing: Slow is fast and fast is slow. There's no shortcut other than understanding. Which takes time and good input (great books, good mentors, practical experiences,..). And everything is driven by social factors, not technical prowess. The latter helps with solving problem, but the former defines the problem in the first place. Improve your soft skills as well as your technical abilities.
Laziness, lack of skill, poor communication, and unexplained delays are so much the norm that people who need something done are willing to pay top dollar just for the mediocre folks. I'm thinking mechanics and home repair contractors as the most obvious example but there are white collar equivalents too.
I'm trying to teach my kids that these days, if you are working for someone else, literally just showing up on time and doing exactly what is asked (and with integrity) will get you to the front of the pack easily with no other special effort, skill, or intelligence needed. It's been working unreasonably well for me, at any rate.
Agreed, but want to add that anybody who is good at those skills will likely also be good at time management, and thus not be burdened by digital overconsumption. In other words, good habits breed other good habits.
> The only thing people will truly remember is how you made them feel during a crisis, not the minutiae of what you actually contributed
I agree with most sentiments here except this. Most of what I feel towards colleagues and the ones I look back respecting the most were the ones that had great contributions, either in emergency situations or in the nick of time, or simply good day in and day out. Some of them are considered assholes by the more softly inclined, but I know proper assholes and those weren't it.
>Getting better at your job, like everything else in life, is just a function of time. Show up, and then show up consistently. Put in the time. Be patient. Le
ad with an open mind and an open heart
This is generic advice. Of course. But the "digital comsumption/doomscrolling/etc" eats away from that, even if all those other aspects are done...
> I really believe people will go far if they focus on this kind of stuff, and way less on structured self-improvement, productivity hacking, finding "secrets", shortcuts via programs, seminars, coaches, and tools, and all that shallow, nutritionless baloney.
This is exactly the state of mind I am trying to guide myself towards. I know the things you listed are superficial and ineffective, but they also lead to the shiny object syndrome and the 'quest for productivity' that I mentioned in the post. When I reduce the frequency of falling into these traps and eventually let them go completely, I will have come a long way.
Thanks for the insight.
I'd add "learning deliberately" in the category of "necessary". It's not a matter of hacking, secrets or shortcuts but of ramping up faster than by merely passively doing. If a new situation or tool "shows up", think for yourself first, then actually look up a more solid answer. If you are going to use a tool more than 3 times, actually learn to use it. For everyone's favorite example, if you are thrown some Perl, learn enough perl that you won't be the person whining about line noise. Not "everything" about perl, just enough for the task at hand (then more for the next one). In all these cases, (1) it's really not much to learn each time, (2) it will speed you up for the rest of your career.
This does not mean "working on a book for 6 months, doing its projects". You don't need to put in that much time to progress. And when working on a book, skim. Don't spend 6 months on that book. Learning on the job, right in front of your project, can be plenty. If you want to do stuff "on idle time", doing exploratory search engine searches can be a pretty good use of time.
I'd also add mentors. It's work to cultivate a relationship with a mentor. But there is so much that they know and see, that you can't see yet. It would be a shame to ignore that option.
Your advice should only be practiced for about a year or at most two at the start of entering the work force in order to learn the basic attitudes. After that, the only way to advance is by switching jobs all the time. Unless you want to get bigger and better jobs, but lower and lower wage.
Author sounds young .. yes, absolutely try to consume less and create more, it's way more life-affirming than the opposite configuration, but:
Getting better at your job, like everything else in life, is just a function of time. Show up, and then show up consistently. Put in the time. Be patient. Lead with an open mind and an open heart -- opportunities go to those who are present way more often than those who aren't. Willingly take on shitty jobs, do them well, and you'll find yourself being trusted with bigger and better jobs. Learn when to be the worker bee and when to be the queen bee. Say "yes" until you're truly able to say "no". Try to accept that, at the end of the day, things don't matter as much as you think they might -- I'm talking about projects, stress, deadlines, shit that floods your veins with cortisol. The only thing people will truly remember is how you made them feel during a crisis, not the minutiae of what you actually contributed -- and those personal relationships will be the gasoline in the engine of your career.
I really believe people will go far if they focus on this kind of stuff, and way less on structured self-improvement, productivity hacking, finding "secrets", shortcuts via programs, seminars, coaches, and tools, and all that shallow, nutritionless baloney.